I am still receiving frequent requests to comment on the value of using the TaxCoach service. I don’t mind this one bit and am glad people are interested enough to do their own research.
As I have explained countless times, for the past few years I have been too swamped with existing clients to be able to accept any new ones. I do have a self imposed limit on how many clients I can properly handle because I have stuck to my vow from when we relocated here to the Ozarks from the SF Bay Area in 1993 not to hire any employees and have to deal with the kinds of hassles I had to cope with back there.
Pretty much all of the advertising and promotion that Ed & Keith have been doing for their TaxCoach service over the past five years has been focused on how to use it to generate new clientele. Since I routinely turn down several potential clients every week who approach me based on my blogs and websites, it would seem that TaxCoach would be a waste of money for me.
That obviously hasn’t been the case. While I admit that I don’t use TaxCoach as often as my main references, TheTaxBook, for answering questions, I do like the quick and easy way I can use TaxCoach to generate a report on topics relevant to a client or a reader who writes in. I keep this list of the main available report topics in the front of my TaxBook so I can see when a TaxCoach report would be possible for a particular circumstance.
For the past few years, we have also been including one of these TaxCoach update questionnaires with the annual Lacerte tax return organizers. For clients who check off some of the items, I generate a TaxCoach report for those items and any others I feel may be appropriate for the client and include that in the folder with the tax returns. It is so much faster and professional looking than trying to compile that info any other way, including by copying the relevant pages from TheTaxBook.
In the past year, TaxCoach has added some premium services that I have chosen not to sign up for because they are focused almost entirely on how to expand tax and accounting practices. I obviously have no need for that; but for those of you who are looking to add new clients, this would be much more practical and honest than the scam services that lure in new clients under false pretenses and sell them to accountants around the country.
Anyways, I hope this information is useful and I welcome any other questions or comments from readers on TaxCoach, as well as other similar tax reference services.
