2024 Tax Season Thread
 

It's that time.

Let's talk taxes.

I got mine filed. Since more than 2/3 of my gross revenue is farm income, I can file by 3/1 and avoid estimates. I've been doing that, but damn it's a pain in the ass.

I was actually overwithheld a bit this year, but I had to book a massive loss on one of my schedules to do it.

**** Taxes

Anybody know the federal government's venmo account?

Do not want.

Did mine like three weeks ago. Always like to get it done and over with. We typically get a decent refund so that helps as well.

In before the "you're giving the government an interest free loan!" guys show up.

The wife and I had some pretty decent deductions this year which lowered our tax liability more than I anticipated. We're getting a pretty sizeable refund which I normally try to avoid, but it's better than miscalculating in the other direction. Looks like that new Polaris Ranger I've had my eye on will be coming home with me this spring.

Good job giving the government an interest free loan ROFLCOPTERMAO

Shit!!!

I'm going to be paying out the shorts again this year due to a nice commission check in December. I hate taxes

I dont have much left to put in. K1 is done and in.

I might need to do that. Owe $7000 and I have no clue why.

Filed, done, and refund recieved long ago


But my taxes are easy. I have no small business, no income in other states. I only have investments and childcare things.

Well it's really freaking hard to nail it right on, and it really sucks to have to cut a check every year so I always err on the side of refund. That measly couple of thousand or so wouldn't have generated much extra if it was invested anyway.

I'm on the same side as you. I'd rather not have to try and figure that shit out to a penny because I'll end up missing something anyways. I'd rather not owe and just get money back.

One thing I can assure you do not want is leins and seizure notices.

Net owe 100 between State and Fed, will wait to file until April 1st. Used TaxAct for a long time... maybe 20 years...

Ain't nobody here hates taxes more than me. I'd bet real money on it.

Got my businesses done, gotta get the personal ones done.

Didn't pay my estimates this year, kept the cash because I ended up buying and absorbing another office. Hopefully that writeoff keeps me ok.

Depends on the assets you bought and how long they are depreciated over.

So are you the kingpin of the dental world now? :D

Ha, no.

It was a smaller office, I basically just bought his patients and equipment etc.

Dumb question, but will my accountant determine that or?

Do not have.

Seriously, you CPA's perform voodoo black magic. I sit down with my CPA every early December, ask him how much equipment I have to buy to not get raped by the man, and he figures it out within about 5-6 minutes.

I choke back tears, he tells me to stop being a bitch and start shopping.

Incredible.

Well I won $15,000 this year (a teacher award, $15,000 cash and $35,000 in tools for the school) So I held back $5000.00 for taxes, hope that's enough. We usually come in pretty close to even maybe 1000.00-2000.00 back. I keep seeing articles that taxes will be higher this year. :cuss:

What the hell are these taxes you speak of?

I wait until April 11 or so to file each year because I always own, but it's within G. I think if you get +/- 1G you did really well balancing it out.

Come tax time I wish I was farming so I could spend money to bring my taxes down. That is the only time I wish was a farmer.

Because I have an apartment attached to my house, I have to go through every credit card transaction, electronic payment, and written check to see what expenses apply to the house, to the apartment, or to an apportioned combination of the two. It's roughly 1,200 transactions this year.

Now, you may ask if I could do it as I go and not have to do it all at once at the end of the year, and the answer to that question is yes. Yes, I could, and every year I think I should, and then I don't.

Sucks for sure.

Had a good year killing weeds and spent an ass load on equipment and repairs so offset most.

Cap gains are a killer so been holding back on taking stock profits.


Hope cattle stay strong so I dont get blind sided. My customers that are all grain are about to get a dose of reality with cheap corn and beans in the next year or more.

I have a massive Tax Bill due to the Feds on 4-15, primarily because I took advantage of a few tax loopholes in 22 and 23. I ****ing hate taxes...

Can anyone explain the child tax credit and the possible change? If I understand it correctly there is a $2,000 credit. $1,600 is refundable. Which the government may change, but if I owe more than the $2,000 in taxes, then any additional refundable amount won’t matter to me.

quickbooks makes this very easy.. you can even split receipts in case a percent of a receipt can be written off...


I rarely endorse things, but quickbooks has really changed my life with the automated connection between my various accounts and tracking expenses / income..


is it still a chore? yes. Do i procrastinate and wait too long and let transactions "build up" in the queue.. my god yes. But , its SOOO much better now.

I saw something this year that had never occurred to me before.

I had two good stocks that I had a fair amount of money in, and they were up quite a bit. Both companies got acquired in 2023. Instead of a stock exchange, they were allowed to just take my stock and pay me for it. So now, because of a decision that some big company made, I owe a lot of unplanned capital gains tax. I didn't want to sell the stock, either. The sale was forced on me. That really stinks.

wrapping up loose ends but this will be the 1st year in a long time that I havent had to file an extension, and its because i FINALLY started using quickbooks instead of becoming the guy from Christopher Nolan's "Memento" as usual.

I've had $1 returns twice. Never cashed them, they would send me new checks every year. Got real pissed last year when they changed their rules and applied under $5 returns to the next year's taxes automatically.

Sent from my SM-S906U1 using Tapatalk

****ers! They always get more of my money than should be allowed to take from me.

First, don't lump me in with those psychos. I'd eat a bullet if that was my life. ****.

Your books must be in good order.

I've just accepted the rape. I needed to retain earnings and improve my cash position. So rape it is.

There are rules for different treatments. The equipment I think will be 5 or 7 years. If you bought a building it will be like 29 years I think. Then there is Bonus and 179 available, so there are levers to pull. I'm not very good on the depreciation shit, I just believe the software and carry forward as much depreciation as I can.

Dude. Get a different credit card for business only expenses. Then put all the non-deductable shit in a big pile that no one cares about, and light that shit on fire.

Or just **** your credit card statements alltogether and calculate them off your receipts. You have to keep them anyway.

I'm dumping QB. Hopefully next winter. They've got a bad case of the suck.

My wife had her withholding set to married filling separately by mistake all year. :facepalm:

Couple that with rolling an IRA over to a ROTH and we had to pay $4k.

Great!

Thank god I didn't get into corn futures this past year. Holy shit.

It’s not that much if you have that Lewdog cheddar. :D :Poke:

Seems like chump change for a guy like you

Nah man, I'm cheap as **** and my wife barely works. Basically a single income household over here!

Single 7 figure income

Bro, that ain't me. You've got me confused with Scho!

Yeah, yeah, I should do something like that. We tried last year to track it live, but we ran out of steam in February or so.

What happened with them? How long have you been using quick books? What changed?



What are you going with now?


I just started using quickbooks and compared to what I was doing before, it seems amazing and has really changed my life. Just curious what you are going with now and why? And if you think it would be worth it for a fairly normal but serious user (1 personal , 1 business) to consider switching or if I would even notice "the suck" that you're talking about?



I started in Jan of 2023 too. Definitely have times where I run out of steam... but the transactions building up motivate me. Ill ignore it for a few weeks and then sit down and do big chunks. I also did some work right before I turned stuff in to my CPA but even the work that I did was easier because I knew every transaction was already there... I just had to tag it and mark it as whatever class or category or whatnot. And after a while some of them actually start coming in already tagged because the AI 'learns' which categories to assign the different transactions. Its probably simple stuff to cpa's like Buehler but to me I am loving it.

Quickbooks online sucks a big long cock, and then they make it expensive as hell on top of sucking outright. **** them for going that direction.

I'm still using QB Pro 2018 as basically a check register for all transaction by transaction expenses & income. Hand it to my accountant and we are good to go.

Programed my own spreadsheet for employee withholding. Works like a charm.

I'm no CPA. I just stayed at a Holiday Inn last night. I'd rather beat my dick with a hammer than make a career out of accounting.

I'm using Quickbooks Desktop 2021. They made a big push to get everyone to online. It has been 5 or 6 years since I used it, but one the clients my accountant gave me to work on switched and it was fire roasted asshole. It was a reeruned number of steps to even get to a balance sheet or income statement.

Quickbooks Desktop was simple, easy, cheap. Excellent for small business. With online they're trying to automate everything and layer in all this dog**** that a vast majority of small business doesn't need. They're trying to position themselves for more advanced businesses, which is fine, but this year they did away with Desktop entirely. Like as of July you will never again be able to buy Desktop. So ultimately they're abandoning small business that just need a bookkeeping system.

MOTHER**** THAT. In our circle of farm entities, there are several really low volume entities that do some business. So they're all on Quickbooks, which is fine with Desktop because you can load as many company files as you want. We put the company files on a shared drive, so it's backed up and we can all access them if need be. Quickbooks online charges per entity. So those low volume entities are priced out.

They used to have a simple intuitive payroll system that was very cost effective. NOPE. They've upped that to a payroll subscription per entity per employee and like quadrupled the price. Because **** you that's why. Since my payroll isn't supported anymore I rolled it to Onpay, which is a 3rd party provider which will do all the same shit as quickbooks, but will prepare and send filings, pay ETFPS and State all for cheaper than Intuit.

Check printing is a function that I use a lot, and they're trying to push everyone to automatic payments and automatic downloads from the bank, which is fine in theory. If you have an A/R and A/P staff to appropriately classify payments and receipts. It's way easier to just print checks when I pay bills, and mail the damn things, rather than **** with automatic downloads which I'll probably blow through and make a bunch of errors.

Then, to top it all off, I call customer support to ask some questions about updating to the newer version of Desktop, this twat on the phone was a total bitch**** to me all the while a ****ing chicken was crowing in the background. Then later some team lead called me back to ask about it, so I told her about the **** and chicken shit, and asked about Desktop. So then he tells me that it's going away in July because **** me, right? And that he's certain I'll LOVE online, if I just take a couple days and go through a training course. I told him I got trained on Desktop in all of 10 ****ing minues. 2 day training course is the crux of the issue.

So Intuit can can feel free to clean my rectum with their tongues.

In the short/intermediate term, we can still download Desktop 21 from the website, but before they shitcan that (because you know they will), I'm going to find a better solution.

For the low volume entities there is a free one called Manager.io that I think looks promising. I just need to get in it and use it to see if it will work.

There is a farm-centric ERP program out there from FBS Systems out there. If not, Xero is supported by OnPay and at a lower price point than online quickbooks. Zar Money has some good reviews out there but I never tried it. Supposedly it is a decent option for a QB clone at a lower cost. Medlin and PC Mars are older much cheaper options that have been around for a long time, and are perfectly fine for most businesses.

For you, Wave is free (owned by HR Block) and I've heard good things about. I'm going to try Manger.io. Freshbooks is pretty cheap and probably has similar functionality to what you're using. Zipbooks is also free, and looks fairly appealing for bank-link classification type stuff.

/rant

Bueh summed up my feelings much better with quickbooks online. It is complete and utter AIDS.

I use that OLT thing. Online Taxes. It's like $9 to file but who cares? I was happy with my refund this year.

Thanks for randomly triggering the hell out of me today by mentioning Quickbooks.

Filed and received my $$, I pay in much more than needed in case. $3500 refund this year. Only took 8 days. Damn mail takes longer these days.

Mail? WTF?

No shit. I didn't need to go on a giant anti-intuit rant this morning, but that's what happened. ROFL

thanks , Ill have to look at those. I have loved quickbooks, and I really like the fact it is online... so I think maybe its just different perspectives and the fact I didn't start out using (or ever even seeing) older versions.


I love that quick books captures every transaction from my checking and credit cards automatically and I can issue invoices. I don't write ANY (well , extremely rarely, and dont need to print them) checks any more, everything out here is automated.. (electronic payments)



So I think that the must have features are being able to capture transactions from multiple sources, the more automation the better. Also needs to do 1099's and track vendors and so forth


I think I pay about $1000 a year for quickbooks (medium sized 'small business' maybe 500k per year in expenses, and also income hopefully more than that LOL) , and that can be written off.. I never really even thought about it being cheap or expensive, just sort of went along with it... (its about 1/500th of my expenses) so it is good to know I have options and I will look into it (intuit?)... sorry couldnt resist..


thanks again.. not looking forward to learning another app but i mean if it is free and can do the same things, **** it

Yeah, if you're looking for a QB clone, Xero is probably the best. When I suggested those, it was coming from the perspective of starting with a shoebox. If you're running a business through it, there might be some better options. Without knowing anything about the business it's hard to postulate what would work best.

From what you're describing, I'd probably go in this order:

Xero
Zipbooks
Freshbooks
Wave
Zar Money

EDIT: I'd throw manager.io in there. I didn't realize it could pull in bank statements. It may not get you where you want to be, but I'd look into it.

Since Intuit started engaging in ****ery, there has been considerable resources put into competitive products.

RE: Automated Payments. I don't have a lot of love for automated payments. At least without being able to scale staff to review the entries.

I manage cash pretty tightly. I negotiated some terms with my bank that I gave up automatic sweeps. So everything that comes in, I have to cover. And some of my bills are ...we'll call them "variable". Moreover, almost everything that hits the business I track independently to projects and different allocations so I have to touch every bill anyway. So I pay bills twice a month when I run payroll. Anything that hits automatically (at least on the expense side) is going to cause me problems. So I don't do it.

My personal shit, the only thing that doesn't come out automatically is my mortgage.

I've got two companies that owe me 1099s, and they don't get them to me by April 15th. I never had to file an extension until last year, and now I'll have to do it two years in a row because these two companies don't have their act together. I thought they were required by law to get them to me by January 31st or some such date.

It's weird to me that some substantial credits (solar in my case) require no documentation to claim them. I mean, I know I could get audited and that I'd have to provide it then, but you'd think I'd at least have to submit an invoice or something. Pretty sure I had to do that for my EV credit, but for my solar credit, I just type a number in the line and say

https://media.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2l...z7aw/giphy.gif

There is no documentation required for anything on the return.

Closest you get is with the EITC and CTC you have to mark down what you're retaining for suppor.t

Yeah, there's a deadline.

If you're claiming the income, just file them.

Got $90 from feds and owed the state $60.

A push is a win

Enjoy wasting my money feds!

Really? I could have sworn I had to upload something in the past. :shrug:

But regardless, it's weird how much of all of this is essentially done on the honor system (with the obvious caveat that they can come after you hard if you intentionally claim stuff you're not eligible for).

It really does make you wonder. The AI involved in detecting cheaters must be pretty cool. I was talking to someone the other day and they were telling me about some of the red flags that can trigger an audit (owner draw as X percent instead of paying yourself a higher salary, like for an LLC)


and some of the lines were pretty arbitrary....


If I ever get audited , theyre gonna owe me money and it will be a huge waste of their time. I like to err on the side of caution , a la a Marty Shottenheimer tax strategy

Yeah, you might be right on some of that Colorado shit. And I'll admit I know ****all about that EV credit you got, but most of the shit that is attached is just other IRS forms. IRS can barely manage a 1040 much less all the supporting documentation.

Is that a federal credit you're getting or state?

The EV credit was both federal and state, but now that you mention it, I wonder if it was the state version that required me to upload something (bill of sale probably). The feds just required the VIN on the form, which I'm sure is how they're monitoring it.

The solar credit is even less detail than that. The form just asks for the address and how much it cost.

It would be super cool if the IRS was using some sort of satellite AI to identify what locations have had solar installed. I'm confident that it exists - roofers can give you a price quote based on those kinds of systems.

But I strongly suspect the IRS isn't sophisticated enough for that kind of tech.

"IRS and Satellite AI" doesnt feel right ;)

Thanks alot.



I am new to the scene... I come into the club and I date the 1st accounting software I find.


Then you assholes tell me AFTER the fact it has AIDS..


And I actually kind of liked it.


And now its ruined for me.


**** all of you!!!!


Im downthumbing all of you HARD

That's the final straw. I'm going to sneak into your house and install Lotus 1-2-3 on your computer after doing an upper-decker in the master bathroom.

Holy hell man. There must be some longstanding beef between you guys. Because the upper decker is one thing, but Lotus 1-2-3? Jeez

There are 85,000 new agents to pound you with a hammer if you don't do things right. They'll find you.

Okay, that was brutal. I've got everything in the accountant's hands other than four documents that haven't been sent to me yet. I'm glad to get that done.