I made a valiant effort to organize my taxes today. I sat down and pulled out the file folder marked “2007 Taxes” that seems to swell towards the end of the year, on the verge of bursting open and creating a mess of receipts, forms, letters and other documents whose sole purpose in life is to create a lot of organizational hassle for me, and to keep me in the good graces with the IRS.

In expanding on last years method to organize my taxes as best I can before heading to my CPA, I pulled out three yellow letter-sized envelopes. Personal tax information will go in one, rental property related stuff in another, and yet another for my oil company.

The oil company tax information is fairly straight forward, as all the information I need is religiously stored in Quicken, and all I do is print out an itemized letter. A quick tally of barrels of oil and MCF of gas produced during the year for depreciation purposes and I’m set.

The rental property is a little more involved, as there are different categories of deductions: improvements, repairs, and “other expenses”. Improvements get amortized over the life of the house, repairs are deducted immediately, as are “other expenses” like mileage reimbursement, etc. So there are a few decisions to be made, but I make sure the CPA has an overriding input on how those are handled. After all, that’s why I’ve hired him in the first place.

Personal taxes require the most organization, as there are receipts to be accounted for, property and real estate tax receipts to locate, and about a dozen different investment accounts between my wife and I that have to get sorted through.

I try and summarize all the activity in a Word document, which seems to reduce the number of “Um, what does this scribbled on receipt supposed to imply…” type of phone calls. It seems to work pretty well, actually.

I’m about 95% done with the organizational aspects of my 2007 tax preparation, with the exception of the TDAmeritrade 1099 form, that they decided to delay this year as they wanted to make sure the distributions were characterized properly. “We’ll have them to you by the end of February…” they say.

Go figure. All this work and I’m waiting on TDAmeritrade to send me the 1099 so they don’t have to issue a revised 1099 later…

Oh well, what I’ve got so far should give the CPA a head start at any rate.

I think I’m getting my tax organization methods refined fairly well, and each year it seems to go a little smoother than the last.

So what are your methods to organize taxes?

Taxes CPA, tax organization, Taxes