5 Ways to Make Tax Season Easier

It’s never too early to start preparing for tax season. Tax season is painful each time it comes around, but it comes around just infrequently enough that you forget just how painful it is, so it’s easy not to get better at preparing for it.

But prepare you should, and this guide can help you get a start. Here are the five best tax season hacks, from hiring a CPA to creating a business account.

1. Hire a CPA

The most straightforward hack for tax season is not to do them yourself—hire a CPA instead! With a company like MI Tax CPA, you can hire someone to help prepare and file personal taxes, business taxes, and even things as complicated as quarterly contractor’s taxes.

Tax filers received around $730 billion intax returns in 2021 alone; don’t miss out and be one of the few who don’t get a return. Hire a CPA and get $1000s back!

2. Create a Separate Business Account

If you run your own business, you likely already have a business account to separate those funds from your personal funds. But it’s a good idea to start a business account even if you have a part-time job, a side hustle, or even a passion project.

Why? For one, you double the number of deductions you can make when you separate business funds from personal funds. Furthermore, it’s harder to overlook professional deductions when you’ve got a separate business account.

Another great reason to make this move is preventive action. It is easier than you think to commit tax fraudaccidentally—this crime costs the U.S. government over $1 trillion each year. It’s very easy to do when you claim personal expenses as business expenses and vice versa. And that’s easy to do when you haven’t separated your personal expenses from your professional ones!

3. Go Paperless

The reason to go paperless is you save on the headache of sorting and organizing and frantically searching through mountains of paperwork come tax time. When you digitize all your paperwork, you can quickly search for key terms and easily find all the documents you need.

4. Download a Budgeting App

You could do your budgeting the old-fashioned way, or you could download a budgeting app. There are plenty of apps out there that allow you to create spreadsheets, search for deductions, delineate personal from business expenses, and you can color code and flag everything with ease.

5. Know Your Deductions

Finally, when doing your taxes, know your deductions! This stage is where a CPA comes in handy. The tax code is a gigantic, archaic document that no one knows inside and out.

It is very helpful to have a confidante or team of people to go through it with you to find the appropriate deductions for you to file.