The months of January through April are often known as the busiest months for bookkeepers and accountants and consists of hours on end of preparing and auditing their client’s annual financial statements while also focusing their attention on personal tax returns.
Our team has the opportunity to speak with accountants and bookkeepers on a daily basis and we understand the frustrations involved with this busy season. This is why we have come up with a few ways to ease the pain and make this frustrating time a little bit easier for our beloved bookkeepers and accountants. Below, you can find more information about how to set-up your LedgerDocs account to simplify the personal tax process and to make sure you have all of your client’s documents on time, in one easily accessible location.
LedgerDocs for Personal Tax
Many of our users have set-up their LedgerDocs account as a way to receive personal tax documents from their clients in a more timely and efficient manner. The idea is simple – clients email their documents into LedgerDocs using a unique email address. Once uploaded, the bookkeeper and/or accountant will access the documents and prepare the personal tax returns based on the information provided. The great thing is, this solution can be customized for your firm for only $108 per year!
See below for more information on how to set up your account. You can also get in touch with our support team for more information regarding LedgerDocs for Personal Tax.
How to Set Up Your Account
(1) Create a New Company
The first step to simplifying the tax process is to create a new company within LedgerDocs for your client’s to upload their documents to. Within this company folder, you can create as many sub-folders as necessary for each of your clients. When documents are uploaded, each document will be found in the inbox of the company, and can then be filed away in their designated subfolder. See step 3 for more details on how to easily find and file documents.
(2) Set-Up Your Firm’s Email Address
There are multiple ways for clients to upload documents into LedgerDocs but for this purpose, you would set up a unique company email address for clients to send documents to. By creating a unique company email address, you ensure that clients are only able to email information into LedgerDocs and will not have access to the specific company. This means restricting access to protect your other client’s information that has been uploaded.
For example, if the name of your firm is ABC Accounting, you can create ABCaccounting [at] app.ledgerdocs.com and have all of your client’s email their information into it. For more information on how to create your unique email address, see our Help Desk.
(3) Uploading Documents via Email
We have heard some great tips from users currently using LedgerDocs in this manner, especially about some of the ways that they have trained their clients to upload documents. Because all files uploaded are sent directly into the inbox of the company, it is important to provide your clients with a short list of rules to upload documents. By following these rules, you are able to easily file documents into their respective sub-folder and get the tax process started. See our simple “Email Rules & Regulations” list below:
- Attach documents in an email and send to (e.g. ABCaccounting [at] app.ledgerdocs.com)
- Type your business name in the subject of the email.
(4) Getting Started
Now that your client has uploaded all of their documents into LedgerDocs, you can now get started preparing their files. As you can see from our “Email Rules & Regulations” list, your client will have uploaded documents via email with their business name in the subject line. This is an important step, as you can now use the LedgerDocs search function to find documents uploaded by a specific client and batch move them to your designated sub-folder.
Now that you have all of your clients documents organized and in one easily accessible location, you can carry on with preparing their personal tax returns.
Sign up for our free 14 day trial today, or get in touch with our support team to get your Tax Account set up!
