Don’t Settle For TurboTax This Tax Season

By: Rachel Raupp

As tax season rolls around, it’s important to know your options and to choose what’s best for you. This includes whether to have a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) do your taxes or TurboTax.

For a little background, TurboTax is an American tax preparation software. It’s the #1 best-selling tax preparation software, which means it must be the best choice for everyone, right? As a matter of fact, if you have opened a small business or own one, hiring a CPA during tax season is the way to go, not a software program.

Although this route will be more expensive, a CPA can assist you in tax planning. Small businesses often times have more complex financial situations and need assistance in making financial decisions in the future, which will determine the amount of taxes they will paid over time.

TurboTax can do this for you in a very black and white manner. A CPA would be more helpful in showing you the bigger picture, and they also have expertise to assist you. Planning carefully is incredibly important for small businesses as this can help you pay less in taxes to the government. A computer software program simply cannot do this.

Another benefit of hiring a CPA is that they are very experienced in working with tax information and can finish the work in a fraction of the time that you can, which you would have do with a tax preparation software. Although a computer is doing the calculations, you are the one entering the data. This can be time consuming, especially with how complex small businesses can be.

A qualified CPA shows you deductions and write offs that a software does not. This is a huge benefit of hiring a CPA – they help you find ways to lower your taxes. They will also show you anything in your tax return that could be a red flag for the IRS, and if you are audited, they can assist you in the process.

If you ever feel like you’re doing your taxes wrong or have an anxious feeling, hire a CPA. It’s better to pay a little extra to have them done right than to question if they are. A software program can only do so much for you, a CPA can go above and beyond.