After decades of doing my own taxes, I am just not well enough to do it this year,so have hired a local cpa. I will be charged for (a lot of, I suspect) data entry to get all the year to year carry forwards of various types entered manually, in addition to all the usual static data that is normally entered every year, if there is no way to import it from Turbo Tax. Is anyone familiar with typical professional tax prep software for very small cpa firms (two person partnership)?
There is one professional software product, ProSeries, that can open a TurboTax file, so I assume it could transfer the information to the following year. I don't think there is any other professional software that can import from TurboTax, so I would have to say that "typical" professional software, meaning anything other than ProSeries, can't do it.
I agree with Bob that only Intuit products can import directly from TurboTax. However, many professional products can import from a PDF file. If you are using TurboTax Desktop, you can generate a PDF file (selecting print all forms and worksheets), and possibly the tax professional can import some carryover information from that. He (or his software provider) may charge something for it, but it may be less than the data entry charge.
I'm not a paid preparer, but I do a little bit of gratis tax work. Whenever I need input from prior year returns prepared by someone else, I go back and verify the accuracy of that data. If my license and livelihood were on the line, I wouldn't be comfortable with simply relying on unverified data imported from another preparer's tax file or PDF.
How many years back do you go, since last year's return may include data imported from the previous year, and so on. Do you ask them for the original receipts from several years back, so you can recreate it all from scratch?
And if you were a paid preparer, doing this for dozens of clients, do you think you'd have time to re-enter previous year's data so you can calculate this year's taxes?
Depends. It's usually the name, address, age, relationship, filing status, exemptions, dependents, etc. that is imported. If I'm preparing for a family member and I know their situation, I'll need less verification. If it's a friend of a friend with custody and support issues, I'll want to see more documentation. Either way, when it's the first return I've prepared for the taxpayer, I want the information first hand rather than transcribed from a prior year return. I once helped a farmer/friend who had been using a preparer of questionable repute. His depreciation schedule was in shambles. Assets on the schedule which were long gone, assets on the farm but not on the schedule. It took weeks of reconstruction and several years of amended returns to get numbers that I could confidently carry forward to the then current year.
If I was a paid preparer, I'd want to do a sufficiently thorough first return interview to ensure the level of accuracy that each client, the tax system, and my practice deserved.
There's no way to isolate the carryover information and just print that. You can easily print a copy of the tax return with all the worksheets, but I don't think that qualifies as allowing easy manual input to another program.
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