What your accountant actually needs from you

Accountants bill for cleanup. If you hand over a bank export and a shoebox, a meaningful chunk of your invoice is someone sorting your transactions into categories you could have sorted yourself in a few minutes a month.

The one page they want

• Total income for the year, with the individual payments behind it.
• Total expenses grouped by category, not a transaction list.
• Estimated tax payments you already made, with dates and amounts.
• Any 1099s you received, and a note on income that didn't come with one.
• Home office square footage and business mileage, if you're claiming them.
• Anything unusual — a big equipment purchase, a bad debt, a business started or closed.

That's it. A single sheet with those numbers on it replaces most of the back-and-forth that drags tax prep into March.

Why the categories matter more than the total

A single number for expenses tells your accountant nothing about which ones are fully deductible, partly deductible, or need to be capitalized and spread over several years. Grouping them is the work. Once they're grouped, the return is mechanical.

Questions worth asking them

While you have their attention, three questions repay the meeting many times over:

• What set-aside percentage should I use for next year, given what you just saw?
• Am I at the point where an S-corp election would save me money, or not yet?
• Is there a retirement account that would lower this year's bill?

Those three answers are typically worth more than the return itself, and they only work if the person answering is looking at organized numbers.

Do it as you go

January reconstruction is a full weekend. Ten minutes a month is four hours a year, and it's accurate.

The Quarterly workbook builds that year-end page automatically as you log income and expenses — income, expenses by category, and tax already set aside, all on one tab you can print and hand over.