Nobody likes to work with messy tax data. If data is not organized, we will organize it but this will add to our time and your charges for preparing tax returns. Plus most times there will be open items which we need to clear with you before we can proceed with completing your tax return.
Also, we can’t put something on your tax return we don’t know about. We do check to see if an item from last year is here this year. For example if you have interest from BofA last year, we will ask for the 1099 for this year if it’s not with the information. However if you opened a new account at Wells Fargo which paid interest, we have no way of knowing that if we don’t get the document.
Tip: Organize you tax information in the same order as your tax organizer that we send to you. We start at the beginning with the questions, and then systematically go through items for your return. If you need to go back and dig for data each time we turn the organizer page, you will not enjoy the process, will you?