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TAX PREPARATION SECRETS for INDEPENDENT CONTRACTORS from your Tax Coach

By Jeffrey Brooks, CPA, CFP, MBA for JBrooks Wealth Advisors, PC, a Professional CPA and CFP Firm  jeff@jbrookswa.com  602-292-2009  Please consult with your professional tax CPA regarding your specific circumstances!

We are a Phoenix CPA firm that is nationally recognized for tax planning and tax preparation and help business owners who want to reduce their taxes.

I believe it will be useful to give you a sample of what we do after each meeting. We believe it is important to summarize a tax action plan customized to each client!

Recommendations:

1. Do not pay off student loan. $350/Month or $4,200 interest deducted per year.
2. Yes, good idea to pay off credit cards but you want to make sure you do not pay off too much and cannot fully fund retirement plan.
3. Your main job is helping people and minimizing your time with bookkeeping. QuickBooks™ but  Quicken™ can be modified for business use.  Since your primary purpose is to reduce taxes and minimize time, you should use Quicken™ if at all possible.
4. Sole proprietorship should be changed to an S corporation or partnership to reduce your payroll taxes.
5. However, if you want simplicity, remain as a Sole Proprietorship.  If you hire an employee, you must apply for a federal ID number.
6. No S corporation because you may not continue to be an independent contractor. However, we will evaluate this each tax year
7. Establish LLC for your Sole proprietorship. You do not need an attorney. You can save money by using a service like Smallbiz or Legalzoom.
8. Most likely we will establish an Office Admin Expense reimbursement program. I need to research the newest information. Then I need to contact you. The flat rate for the intellectual property is the $436.
9. We will prepare a tax plan before any tax planning and after tax planning.
10. We will not depreciate your vehicle because the Kelly Blue book fair market value is so low on your 2008 vehicle. Instead you will need to get reimbursed at .56 cents per mile.
11. Please keep track of independent contractor mileage for a sample period of at least 90 days.
12. Do not buy a new vehicle as long as current vehicle is working well without costly repairs. Because you probably work less than 50% on independent contractor work, I recommend that you never lease a vehicle in the future.
13.  If you plan on buying a vehicle, please contact me first.
14.  Make sure to set up  separate business checking accounts and Visa/MasterCard used for business.
15. Keep personal and business expenses separate.  If you pay for an expense that is part business and part personal, use the Zdraw account in Quicken™ for the personal use.
16. Please make sure to withhold at least $6,000 federal and $1,500 AZ for 2014 to avoid underpayment penalty.  You want to withhold the dollars out of your payroll and not pay estimated taxes due to the underpayment penalty rules.
17. The tax plan strategies will include recommendations. For example, we might want you to pay in additional state withholding because it is tax deductible.
18. Using your list of independent contractor revenue and expenses, please try to get reimbursed from the business account.  Yes, you will need to write checks from the personal account to the business account and immediately write a check from the business account to the personal account so we can get everything recorded through the business account.
19. But, if this does not work, you will need to give us summary year to date amounts of revenue and expenses and we will need to input this information directly into the tax plan and your personal tax returns.  We will need to see all of ZFFE too in Quicken™.
20. If you do not fully fund your health savings account through work, we might have you contribute the balance to get to the maximum allowed.