Income tax return preparation

Advice from an expert
Every spring you want to collect all those slips and roll up the sleeves to take a stab at the latest rule changes made by our tax policy makers and collectors and are excited to do your tax return, right? Maybe not. Few people enjoy doing tax returns and for many it is an annual chore they would much rather delegate.

As you can imagine, we know how to do your tax return both more accurately and faster than anyone else. Who else knows what financial information is supposed to be on the return better than your financial advisory team?

This is a time when we try to add great value in our client’s financial lives by tying things together through the lens of taxation, taking the stress out of tax filing and making sure it is complete, accurate and optimized. We will look at last year and perhaps make plans for the next year and usually do a full financial review at the same time, all in 60-90 minutes!

Improvements in technology have changed tax prep work greatly over the last 25 years. Our tax program can now download much data directly from the CRA database but for items such as medical expenses, donations, tuition, childcare, home office and rental income we still need you to provide information. To make it even easier we have created a three-minute video that quickly runs through the basics. Check it out here. We using the following three-step approach to tax preparation and filing:

1. Book a tax prep meeting for a date when you expect you will have received all tax data. While you might be ready for the last week of February, likely there is still data coming out for most people and we normally get up to full speed in the first week of March.
2. Send us your completed tax worksheet (we send one our in late February) a week or more before the meeting so our meeting time is most productive.
3. During the meeting we will share our screen to explain, review, refine, finalize and we expect to eFile during the meeting or very shortly afterwards. For those who actually like doing their own taxes, the screen sharing process keeps them in complete contact with all the data and they feel in control as if they did the work themselves. We will use a digital signature method so all you will need to do is reply with an approval to our email containing the filing documents that already have an image of your signature, with no printing or scanning required on your end.

If you have not previously  done so, Investia Financial Services Inc. requires us to have you sign a disclosure form to clarify that income tax preparation work is a completely separate business.