The two words that can best describe How To Prepare for Tax Season would be “get organized”. The one thing you never want to do is to show up at your accountant or tax preparer’s office with a shoe box, file folder or manila envelope full of little scraps of paper, that you call receipts, and hand it to him or her, thinking that a tax preparer should be more than happy to sort through that mess, looking for your deduction figures. They don’t and, if they agree to do that at all, they will charge you accordingly.Didn’t catch that? This explains it.

So, get out your calculator, preferably with a printout tape, and add up your receipts, making a nice neat organized list of your deductions. If you’re not sure if something is a legitimate deduction or not, put it on the list anyway, as a separate item, and let your tax preparer advise you if you can use it or not. Then, hand-write on a legal pad or print up on your computer, all of the totals for your deductions and take them to your tax preparer. They’ll thank you and it will cost you less.

You might also want to prepare for next year by getting one of those receipt scanners that enters your receipts automatically into a program and adds them up for you, saving you a great deal of effort at tax time.