Tax Accountants

Tax accountants collect financial date from either an individual or a company and, using current tax laws and regulations, prepare tax returns and the resulting paperwork including an itemized list of deductions. They also prepare personal financial statements. Tax accountants are a great resource for tax planning, which is why it’s wise to use them throughout the year. They can also calculate and disperse the payroll for a company. A tax accountant is fundamentally important to any business, although individuals with many assets and investments may which to procure the services of one as well.

Accounting Career Information Tax Attorney

The differences between tax attorneys and tax accountants start in the way they are trained. To become a tax attorney one must ace his LSAT’s, earn a three year post-graduate degree (called the Juris Doctor) at a competitive law school, study all aspects of tax law, and finally be licensed by the State Board of Law Examiners. They will also only do heavy business a few months out of the year. Tax accounting is a much easier field to get into. The biggest requirement is that you excel at math. Every state has a different requirement concerning credit hours, but all of them require a B.A. in accounting or a related field. Students are told to pick a specialty such as public, government, or management as early as possible. A low-or-no-paid internship to gain experience is also a must for a future accountant. The last step is to take the four-part, two-day CPA exam from the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. While neither job is easy to get, accountants don’t concentrate nearly as much as the minutia of the laws.

Tax Accounting Software

In recent years tax accountants have slowly been replace by tax accounting software. Turbo Tax, the most popular software, has a loyal following stretching back to when Intuit purchased it’s struggling parent company (Chipset) in 1993. It quickly became the most-used software for tax preparation and spawned an industry of copycats and competitors. It now comes in Basic, Deluxe, and Premier versions. Due to piracy they had to limit the commercial version of their software to being installed on only one computer in 2003, but negative customer reaction quickly removed the restrictions. The Turbo Tax website provides free filing of federal tax returns, and new versions of the software are released every November. Tax Act from 2nd Story Software is Turbo Taxes biggest competitor. It also offers free federal return filing, but has several features lacking in the basic version of Turbo Tax. An interactive tax planning calculator helps in preparation, and the “Split Refund” feature allows customers to deposit portions of their refund in several different bank accounts.