Tax season is stressful. What people often don’t say it’s stressful because it means that you really do get help when you hire someone else to do it.
The main question is not whether tax prep is a pain in the neck, obviously, it can be. Rather, it’s interesting to explore how people benefit from hiring someone else to do it.
Time That Comes Back to You
It takes a LOT of time to prepare taxes, and that time adds up in some truly depressing ways. There’s the time involved in gathering everything. There’s the time spent in preparing and filing. And then there’s the back-and-forth time. If the numbers don’t match up, there’s always the time involved in figuring out what went wrong.
For someone who only has a simple W-2, these hours may not be painful. For anyone else, however, they absolutely do add up. When someone has investment income, real estate, or even just a side hustle that they earned income on, the time can increase exponentially.
Getting help from a tax accountant eliminates all of this. Instead of spending hour upon hour of your valuable time prepping your taxes, someone else can take care of it, while it takes you a few weeks or months to avoid the stress of doing it yourself.
There’s more value in this than just the convenience. Your time (and your brainpower) is a resource, and if you don’t have to use that resource to prep your taxes, you’ve got it back.
Money That You Didn’t Know You Were Leaving on the Table
This is where things get interesting. Most tax software is pretty good at finding money for the average taxpayer. There are standard deductions, like charitable giving and property taxes.
But many people who have used tax prep folks have found money that they wouldn’t have realized was available.
Why? Because most tax software doesn’t really ask you questions to get as much money as they can find for you.
Did you renovate your home for energy efficiency? Did a baby come along? Did you rack up some medical expenses? Did you pay for your kid’s college? Each of these are instances where someone who knows their stuff can help you find money.
The math is beautiful here. Someone who pays a few hundred dollars for someone else to do their taxes may find thousands of dollars in unclaimed deductions and credits. Even if it’s “just” a few hundred dollars, the value of the tax prep process comes out to free.
Seriousness That Avoids IRS Problems
Nobody wants to get a letter from the IRS. Even if it’s just a problem with mismatched numbers or something else minor, it can still send a chill down most people’s spines.
Getting help from someone who knows their stuff can seriously mitigate this possibility. They catch all of the entry errors that are made when taxpayers put numbers in the wrong boxes on forms or when the software does not recognize a number that they entered.
A tax prep professional knows what triggers the IRS, what the common mistakes other taxpayers make are, and the other things that may need separate documentation included with each return. They have prepared 100s (even 1000s) of returns and have seen it all.
If any questions come up (and they sometimes do), at least there is someone who knows how to deal with the problem rather than trying to figure it out on your own.
Answers to Complicated Situations
Sometimes people’s lives change in a way that also complicates tax prep. When people get married, buy a house, or start their own business, their taxes can become more complex. When people get an inheritance, it can complicate their taxes as well.
Having someone who can help you with these changes before next tax season comes around is invaluable.
A good tax prep person doesn’t just prep taxes. When someone decides to work with one, they also get someone that they can go to with questions throughout the year.
Do you need to change the amount withheld from your paycheck? How will getting money from multiple income sources change how much taxes are owed? Someone who does tax prep can help you figure these things out.
The process of doing taxes becomes way less confusing, and taxpayers avoid surprises and mistakes by asking questions rather than panicking come tax season.
Peace of Mind That’s Unquantifiable
There’s something super valuable about having peace of mind during tax season when someone else is doing your taxes for you. It’s so much easier than hoping that everything is good to go when you’ve done your own.
The value here is more than just peace of mind. It allows people to become clear about any other financial decisions they make over the course of the year because they will know how certain situations could trigger taxes on decisions that they made.
This may seem unnecessary for someone who has prepared their own taxes for years. However, for someone who has hired someone to prep their taxes in the past, the relief that people report will surprise them, it’s often more valuable than they would have guessed.
The Value of Help Is More than One Number
Getting help is valuable, not just for one reason or another. There are many different benefits of hiring a professional service during tax season. People save time, find money that could have been missed, make fewer mistakes, get better guidance, and enjoy peace of mind, all for a reasonable price.
Which is the greater value, help that is worth more than the time people spend preparing their own taxes? For most taxpayers, once they’ve tried hiring someone else at least once, the answer is yes. Tax season doesn’t have to be a panicky season for anyone. The yearly deadline can be dealt with by someone else who really knows what they’re doing.
