Back to top

Happenings

Click here to go back

COVID-19 Update

Posted by Admin Posted on Mar 16 2020

COVID-19 Update

 

Coronavirus and Your Taxes and Consulting

We wanted to take a moment and address any questions or concerns that you may have about your taxes and consulting during this time and how we are preparing for the unknown.  While we are uncertain how this virus may impact our community, our lives and our work flow, we are taking the necessary precautions and have a plan to continue serving all of you as best we can.

As many of you know we have been a paperless office and have been utilizing secure portals for many years.  Even though you may bring us paper, we scan it and digitize it as soon as we can.  As a result of that and our investment in technology we are able and often do work remotely.  That means that even if we are forced to close our offices temporarily or our staff chooses to work remotely if they are not feeling well, we will still be able to work efficiently and will continue serving you!

In summary, here is our plan both while the office is open and if we are forced to close our office.  The safety of you our clients and our staff is the most important consideration in all of this!

While our office is open
We plan to maintain our normal office hours of 8-5 Monday through Friday until we are told that is not wise or we believe it is no longer safe. During this time, please let us know whether you are comfortable coming in to drop off information, have personal meetings and or pick up information.  We will serve you however you feel is best for you.

Please know that we have hand sanitizer at our front desk, in our bathrooms, kitchen and our conference rooms.  Our staff always has and will continue to clean the conference room tables and other surfaces after every meeting.  Finally, our staff has been reminded to wash and clean their hands often throughout the day, have been directed to stay home if they are not feeling well and to get checked out should they have any symptoms.

Should you need to get documents to us and are not comfortable coming into the office, here are the alternatives.  You can email us information, but we would like to remind you that you should be careful emailing confidential documents.   A more secure option is to use our secure portal system. Our secure portal system can be used to send us any document and QuickBooks files as well!  If you don't have a portal and want one, please just let us know and we can get it set up and train you on how to use it.  They are very easy and efficient.  As always you can mail or fax us information too!

Tax returns are done and don't want to meet in person?  This again is where our secure portals come into play.  We can upload your return to your portal including all items that require action, like signature pages, vouchers etc. 
Then to make sure that you understand the returns, we can either go over them with you on the phone or better yet have a Zoom Video Conference where we can still see each other and actually share our screen to walk through the return! Don't have or want a portal?  No worries we can mail you everything and go over the return with you over the phone or via Zoom!

What happens if we are forced to close our office?
All of our staff except Gaby our receptionist has the ability to work remotely from home just as efficiently as if they are here.  Many of us already do this some and thus we are all experienced in working together as a team remotely.  We will continue to work hard on your returns and consulting, no matter what happens (assuming we are healthy of course)!

Gaby and Cindy will take turns being present in the office, to receive mail, process paper returns and send out mail as well.  We will still be able to deliver your returns to you remotely as discussed above.

If you need to talk to us, please email us or leave a voice message.  Even if we are working remotely we will check our voicemail 2 -3 times a day and will try to return your call with 24 hours.

Extended Deadline?
You may have heard that there is a proposal to extend the tax deadline.  What happens if they do that?  At this point there are no details of this proposal and we are not sure what it means.  However, we already have enough work to keep us busy through April 15 and we will continue to push hard to that deadline.  We will let you know more when we do!

We hope that his message sets your mind at ease at least with regard to your taxes and consulting projects with us.  Please let us know if have any questions or concerns!