An owner can want the return signed while three months are still unnamed. Signing a return while months are still open puts a name on a number nobody has finished. We prepare it after the months agree.
Read the matched return.
Federal and state returns read the year as one number. The year number inherits every month that was never named. If three months were never named, the year is three months of fog plus nine months of facts. We will not file the fog and call it a plan.
Estimates paid during the year need to be matched to the periods they were meant to cover. An estimate paid from an owner draw is still a payment. Call it a payment. Do not call it an expense, and do not call it income. Losing it inside the draw is how people think they never paid.
A notice about a year that never closed is a request for records. The notice is not a verdict, and the notice is not a promise that the balance shrank. Relief is a request you make after the records are in the stack. This page stops at the stack.
Book to tax differences are normal. Depreciation, meals, and owner pay often move between the books and the return. The movement should be a schedule someone can read, not a plug figure typed on the last night.
Twelve months that match the bank, or a written list of which months do not. The list is allowed. Pretending the list is empty is not. A lender package and a tax return should not be built on two different sets of profit.
The prior year return, if there was one, so estimates and carryovers have a source. A carryover remembered from a conversation is not a carryover. The form is the source.
Entity documents when the return belongs to an entity rather than a person. The name on the bank account and the name on the return should be the same name. If they are not, we stop and ask before we prepare anything.
Payroll reports for the year, if wages were paid. Wages on the return that do not match the payroll filings are a notice waiting to happen. Setup of the payroll company is a different page. This page assumes the filings exist or says out loud that they do not.
We will not promise a refund, a smaller bill, or a strategy result before the year is read. Anyone who puts a dollar outcome in a headline is guessing with your fear. We do not put a figure here at all.
We will not leave an open year inside the return and disclose it only in a footnote nobody reads. If the months are open, the sentence is in the conversation, in ordinary words, before a form is signed.
We will not chase a notice by itself while the books stay open. The notice and the months are one project. Splitting them makes both answers weaker.
Questions about a specific form line belong in the conversation, not in a public paragraph that would have to guess your facts. Bring the line. We set that line beside the months you actually closed.
If estimates were paid from a personal account, bring the dates and the amounts anyway. The payment can still be credited when it was really paid. What it cannot be is a business expense invented after the fact to make the profit look smaller. The draw and the estimate stay two different records that happen to share a date.
Say which year, and how many of its months are actually closed.
You will be talking to the Steven Palmieri practice.