Service
Tax Return Preparation
Federal and state returns for individuals, partnerships, S-corps, and C-corps, prepared and reviewed by the same person who will still have your file next year.
Tax software is very good at arithmetic and very bad at knowing what you did not tell it. It processes the boxes you fill in, in the order it decides to ask for them. It cannot ask why your wages dropped by half in July, and it will not notice that the 1099-B you uploaded shows a cost basis of zero because the broker never received one from your previous custodian.
Most of the work in preparing a return happens before anything gets typed. The intake conversation, the document review, and the questions that come out of both. The typing is the last part of the job and the least of it.
When software is genuinely enough
If your return is one W-2, the standard deduction, and a savings account that threw off thirty dollars of interest, buy the software. For 2025 that deduction is $15,750 single and $31,500 married filing jointly, which for a lot of people is most of the return right there. Those are IRS figures and they move every year. The software will get that return right, it will cost you a fraction of what I will, and you will be done in an afternoon.
The line moves when a return stops being transcription. Self-employment income on Schedule C. A rental on Schedule E. A K-1 from a partnership or S-corp you own a piece of. Equity compensation. More than one state. A year with a sale, a move, an inheritance, or a business that started or ended. Past that point the software will still happily produce a return. It just stops being able to tell you whether the return is correct.
How a return actually gets prepared
Intake and complexity assessment
I start with the year you actually had, not the documents you happened to find. What changed, what you sold, where you physically worked, who else belongs on the return. That conversation produces the complexity score behind your fee, and you get the written estimate before any work begins.
Document review
I read what you send before I enter any of it. Broker statements get checked for missing or wrong basis, and K-1s get read past the face of the form into the footnotes that decide where an item actually lands. Closing statements get split between what is deductible now and what belongs on a depreciation schedule.
The questions that come out of the review
This is the step that separates a prepared return from a typed one. A 1099-NEC with no expenses against it, a state you had wages in but no return for, an HSA contribution sitting in Box 12 of your W-2 that appears nowhere in your records. You did not know to mention any of it, which is the point.
Preparation, then a separate review pass
I prepare the return, set it down, and review it as its own pass, line by line against the prior year and against the source documents. Wrong-line entries and missed elections get caught by comparison. They do not get caught by staring at the screen you just typed into.
Sign and file
You get the complete return, plus a plain explanation of anything that moved materially from last year and why, before you sign. Once you e-sign, I transmit it and send you the acceptance confirmation.
What is included
All of this sits inside the quoted fee. Nothing here turns into a line item later.
- The federal return with every schedule and form your year actually required
- Resident, part-year, and nonresident state returns for each state you owed one in
- A read of your prior-year return for carryforwards, basis, and items that were missed
- Depreciation and basis schedules built once and rolled forward, not reconstructed each spring
- Form 4868 or Form 7004 extension filing if the calendar requires it
- E-filing with confirmation, or paper filing where the IRS still insists on it
- A complete copy of the return and the workpapers behind the numbers on it
- A written note on anything that changed materially from last year, and the reason
Individual and entity returns
Individual returns run from a 1040 with a single W-2 to a 1040 carrying Schedule C, Schedule E for rental property, several K-1s, and four state filings. On the entity side I prepare Form 1065 for partnerships and multi-member LLCs, Form 1120-S for S-corporations, and Form 1120 for C-corporations, including the K-1s that go out to the owners.
If you own an entity, the entity return and your personal return are one problem, not two. The 1120-S sets your W-2 wages, your distributions, your stock and debt basis on Form 7203, and the figures your qualified business income deduction depends on. Splitting them between two firms is how basis quietly disappears and how the same dollar gets reported two different ways. It also means nobody owns the March 16 entity deadline, which lands a month before most owners are thinking about taxes at all.
- March 15, 2027Form 1065 and Form 1120-S returns due
- April 15, 2027Form 1040 and Form 1120 due, and payment due
- October 15, 2027Extended filing deadline, filing only
Multi-state, and the states you did not expect
Nonresident filing thresholds are not uniform and there is no national de minimis rule. Some states start at a single day of work performed inside the border, some at a dollar amount, some at a percentage of your total income. The credit your home state gives you for tax paid elsewhere rarely makes you whole when your home rate is the lower of the two. Physicians picking up locum assignments and engineers on multi-state project work generate these obligations without anyone telling them they did.
The number of states drives both the work and the price, which is why it is one of the complexity factors in the estimate. It is also the factor clients most often forget to mention at intake, usually because the second state was two weeks in October.
The preparer is the same person next year
Continuity does more work than people expect. Whoever prepared the return knows why the basis figure is what it is, which election got made in year one and which one got skipped, why a deduction was taken one way rather than the other. At a firm that routes returns to whoever is free in March, that knowledge lives in the file if someone wrote it down and nowhere if they did not.
I do the work personally, so I am the one who remembers. Next February I am not rebuilding your situation from a pile of documents. I am asking what changed.
The fee is flat and quoted in writing before I start. It comes out of a complexity score built on countable things: income sources, states filed, schedules and forms required, entities involved, transaction volume, foreign accounts, prior-year cleanup. Same inputs, same price, for any client. Here is exactly how that works.
Hunter did my taxes last year. Super professional, straightforward, prompt, and fair. I will never do my own taxes again.
What preparation does not cover
Three things sit outside a preparation engagement. I would rather name them here than surprise you with them on an invoice.
Prior-year cleanup is quoted separately. Unfiled years, books that do not tie to anything, a depreciation schedule that has to be rebuilt from original purchase records: that work has to happen before the current return can be prepared, and it gets scored and priced on its own.
Preparation reports a year that already happened. If you want the number itself to be different, the decisions that move it get made before December 31, and that is tax planning. A preparer can tell you in April what you should have done in September. That is a worse deal than it sounds.
Notices and examinations split at a specific point. If a math-error or document-matching notice arrives on a return I prepared, answering it is part of the job. A full examination, an appeal, or a collection matter is a separate engagement under a Form 2848 power of attorney, which is IRS problem resolution.
Starting
The first conversation costs nothing and obligates you to nothing. Bring last year's return if you have it. It tells me more in five minutes than a questionnaire tells me in twenty, and it is usually where the first real question comes from. After that you get a written estimate, and you decide. Send me the details through the contact form and I will tell you what your year looks like from my side of the desk.
Other services
Further reading
Questions, answered plainly.
Do I need to be in North Carolina for you to prepare my return?
No. IRS practice rights are federal, so a CPA can prepare federal returns and represent taxpayers before the IRS regardless of which state issued the license, and CPA mobility rules allow a licensed CPA to practice across state lines. I am based in Charlotte and prepare returns for clients nationwide. The whole engagement runs on documents and conversation, and neither one requires a shared zip code.
How late can I send documents and still file by April 15?
The IRS began accepting 2026 returns in late January. If everything is in by mid-March, April 15, 2027 is comfortable. After that I will likely file Form 4868, which moves your filing deadline to October 15, 2027 and moves nothing else. The payment is still due April 15 and interest runs from that date on anything unpaid, so an extension is a filing tool and never a payment plan. Extensions are ordinary. They are not a flag.
I already filed my own return and something feels wrong. Can you look at it?
Usually, yes. An amended return on Form 1040-X is generally available for three years from the original filing date or two years from when you paid the tax, whichever is later, so a mistake from two years ago is often still fixable. Sometimes I read a self-prepared return and tell you it is fine, and that answer costs you nothing. When it is not fine, the problem is frequently in a year you had stopped thinking about.
Does a CPA-prepared return lower my audit risk?
No, and I would be careful with anyone who tells you otherwise. The IRS selects returns through its own scoring and by matching what you filed against the forms it already holds, not by who signed the bottom. The far more common contact is not an examination at all: it is an automated notice proposing a change because a 1099, a K-1, or a broker statement did not line up with what got reported. What careful preparation buys you is a return that reconciles to those documents. And if such a notice does arrive on a return I prepared, answering it is part of the job.
The first conversation is free.
Tell me what's going on and I'll tell you plainly whether you need me.
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