When You Need a CPA, and When You Honestly Don't

Plenty of returns do not need me. If you have one W-2, you take the standard deduction, and the most complicated thing that happened all year was a savings account paying interest, good consumer software will get that return right. Paying a CPA for it buys you a tidier PDF.

Better to hear it here than after you have signed an engagement letter. So here is the line as I actually draw it, including the half of it that points away from me.

When the software answer is the right answer

The standard deduction is what makes most simple returns simple. For 2025 it is $15,750 for a single filer and $31,500 for married filing jointly, per the IRS, and those figures move every year. If your mortgage interest, state and local taxes, and charitable giving are nowhere near that number, you are not itemizing, and there is no strategy hiding in your return. There is a total, a withholding figure, and the difference between them.

Software handles that. It also handles the parts of a return that look intimidating and involve no judgment at all: a 1099-B that imports cleanly, one state, student loan interest, a child tax credit with no custody question attached to it.

What the software is actually doing

Consumer software is an interview. It asks a long list of questions and then optimizes the return you describe to it. Answer accurately and it computes a correct result for the facts you supplied. That is worth what it costs.

The gap is everything you did not know to mention. It does not know you rolled an old 403(b) into a traditional IRA in March, which is why the backdoor Roth conversion you did in April came out mostly taxable under the pro rata rule, and it does not ask whether Form 8606 was ever filed for the year you first had basis. It does not know a colleague told you to open a Schedule C so you could run CME, license renewals, and society dues through it, and that because those costs belong to your W-2 job, that Schedule C is an invented business rather than a deduction. It will let you file it. It has no reason to object.

Software optimizes what you describe. A preparer earns the fee by noticing what you left out, and asking about it before it becomes a number on a filed return.

Where a return stops being data entry

Returns get hard in one particular way. They stop being transcription and turn into a series of choices where two defensible answers produce two different tax bills. Depreciation method on Form 4562. Reasonable compensation for an S-corp owner. Which state gets to tax income you earned in three of them. Whether a rental loss is suspended on Form 8582 or deductible this year. None of those have a lookup answer.

Change is the trigger, not income

Income level is a poor reason to hire a CPA. Change is a good one. The year you started the business, sold the rental, exercised the options, moved states, got married, or took your first K-1 is the year the return contains real decisions. The year after that, once the structure has settled, may be routine again, and you should feel free to treat it that way.

Change also comes with a calendar problem. Most of what saves money has to happen before December 31. By April 15 the year is closed and the arithmetic is already fixed, whoever is doing it. That is why planning and preparation are separate services, and planning is the one people skip.

What hiring me does not buy you

A CPA does not make a weak position strong. If a deduction will not hold up, my signature on the return changes nothing except the number of people who were wrong about it. I will tell you when something is solid, when it is genuinely arguable, and when it is not worth the exposure.

A CPA also cannot go back in time. If the property sold in June and we first speak in March, the planning window closed nine months ago, and no amount of preparation skill reopens it.

Here is the one thing a CPA can do that no software does: file a Form 2848 and deal with the IRS directly on your behalf. A notice, an exam, six unfiled years, a lien. Those are representation problems, and re-running an interview does not solve them.

If you land on my side of the line

Then the next question is what it costs, and I would rather answer that before you commit to anything. The fee comes out of a complexity score built on countable things: income sources, states filed, schedules and forms required, entities involved, transaction volume, prior-year cleanup. You get a written estimate before any work begins, and the final price moves against that same scale, up or down, with the reason shown. The scoring and the sequence are laid out in full.