Blog: How To

Form 2553 is a four-page form, and most of it is easy. The election still fails more often than it should, for three reasons: it is filed outside the window, a required shareholder never signs a consent, or the entity was never eligible in the first place. Each of those turns a client who believes it is an S corporation into a C corporation or a partnership, sometimes for years before anyone notices.

This guide follows the order a practitioner actually works in: confirm eligibility, ...

The tax organizer is the most underrated document in a tax practice. Firms spend weeks choosing software and minutes thinking about the questionnaire that feeds it. Then they spend February chasing missing 1099s, re-asking questions the organizer should have asked, and preparing returns twice because the first pass was built on half the information.

A good client tax organizer does three jobs. It collects documents. It asks the questions documents cannot answer. And it sets a date by ...

Becoming an enrolled agent is one of the few routes into professional tax practice that does not run through a degree program or a state board. The IRS sets the requirements, the IRS grants the credential, and the process has four steps: get a preparer tax identification number, pass all three parts of the Special Enrollment Examination, apply for enrollment, and clear a suitability check that includes a look at your own tax compliance.

That sounds simple, and structurally it is.

Most accountants do not learn QuickBooks Online by setting up a clean file. They learn it by inheriting a messy one: a client who has been categorizing bank feed transactions on instinct for three years, an Opening Balance Equity account nobody can explain, and a cash account that was "reconciled" by clicking until the difference went away.

That is why QuickBooks Online training for accountants is different from training for business owners. Owners need to know how to enter an ...

Financial Accounting and Reporting has a reputation as the section that takes the longest to prepare for, and the reputation is earned. FAR covers more distinct topics than any other Core section, its three content areas are weighted almost evenly so none can be skipped, and the task-based simulations expect you to produce numbers, not just recognize them.

The good news is that FAR is also the most predictable section. It tests the FASB Codification, a fixed body of rules, with a ...

Becoming a certified public accountant is a sequence, not a single test. You meet an education requirement, apply to sit for the Uniform CPA Examination, pass four sections within a credit window, satisfy any ethics requirement, complete supervised experience, and then apply to a state board for the credential. Each step has its own rules, and most of them are set by the board in the state where you intend to be licensed.

This guide walks through the path in order, with what to do at ...