Taxes
Hi, My wife and I are planning to spend the winters in Florida in our class C starting next winter. We were wondering how do others deal with getting your income taxes done, do you just make sure yo...
Forum Discussion
No one has yet mentioned the biggest annoyance of doing one's annual taxes -- the miscellaneous receipts accumulated during the year. If you are going to itemize your deductions, you should keep all the receipts appropriate to your claimed amounts.
The easiest way to do that in an orderly way (unlike the "throw them in a drawer" or "shopping bag" techniques often used) is to scan them into a database and then shred them. This eliminates the mess in your RV, and also the risk that you might misplace the one key piece of paper! (Of course, that never happens to you, does it?)
We've been using Neat Receipts on the road and at home since 2010. It pairs scanner hardware for a desktop or a portable scanner; an OCR program which reads the scans for indexable content such as amount, vendor, and date; and a database program which stores the scans and their associated data, so that reports can be extracted (annual sales taxes paid, deductible items purchased, medical bills, etc.).
When you pair this with a good financial records program like Quicken, you can cross-check Quicken's tax reports with Neat Receipts' tax reports -- guaranteeing that you always have the documentation matching your claimed amounts.
Then, in January, you may archive off last year's Quicken & Neat activity onto a thumb drive or optical disk. In February, you can directly download your IRS statements (W-2, 1098, 1099, etc.) from your financial providers as PDF's, or scan any physical copies also as PDFs (using your Neat Receipts scanner -- handy benefit), and add them to your archive media.
We then post to TurboTax with direct downloads from Quicken and our financial providers.
In about 1 hour's time (we have some complicated investments), our taxes are e-filed, and the PDFs of the returns are added to the archive media -- before one copy is stored in a secure fireproof vault box, a second loaded to the cloud, and another shipped home.
No muss, no fuss, and everything is on our machine for comparison against next year.
PS: It also works great for reconciling monthly bank and credit card statements!
BTW, we're in a 26' Class C. ;)
The easiest way to do that in an orderly way (unlike the "throw them in a drawer" or "shopping bag" techniques often used) is to scan them into a database and then shred them. This eliminates the mess in your RV, and also the risk that you might misplace the one key piece of paper! (Of course, that never happens to you, does it?)
We've been using Neat Receipts on the road and at home since 2010. It pairs scanner hardware for a desktop or a portable scanner; an OCR program which reads the scans for indexable content such as amount, vendor, and date; and a database program which stores the scans and their associated data, so that reports can be extracted (annual sales taxes paid, deductible items purchased, medical bills, etc.).
When you pair this with a good financial records program like Quicken, you can cross-check Quicken's tax reports with Neat Receipts' tax reports -- guaranteeing that you always have the documentation matching your claimed amounts.
Then, in January, you may archive off last year's Quicken & Neat activity onto a thumb drive or optical disk. In February, you can directly download your IRS statements (W-2, 1098, 1099, etc.) from your financial providers as PDF's, or scan any physical copies also as PDFs (using your Neat Receipts scanner -- handy benefit), and add them to your archive media.
We then post to TurboTax with direct downloads from Quicken and our financial providers.
In about 1 hour's time (we have some complicated investments), our taxes are e-filed, and the PDFs of the returns are added to the archive media -- before one copy is stored in a secure fireproof vault box, a second loaded to the cloud, and another shipped home.
No muss, no fuss, and everything is on our machine for comparison against next year.
PS: It also works great for reconciling monthly bank and credit card statements!
BTW, we're in a 26' Class C. ;)
