Name: Introduction to ProSeries Tax
Uploaded: 2025-12-23T18:16:07.796Z
Duration: 58 min 8 s
Description: Introduction to ProSeries Tax

Transcript for "Introduction to ProSeries Tax": Hi, everyone. My name is Kevin Reinhard. I am a senior solutions specialist here at Intuit and your presenter for today's meeting, which is an overview of ProSeries professional tax software. Before I begin, first of all, I would just like to say thank you. I do appreciate so many of you joining me on the call today. We have a massive group, so nice to see you all here. Definitely appreciate you taking time out of your schedule to join us. This meeting is gonna last, right about sixty minutes. And really, the goal of the meeting isn't so much to show you every feature and function of ProSeries because there are many, but really to give you a very good understanding of the end to end workflow of tax preparation in ProSeries and to also show you some of the connected tools that we provide that help make our clients' lives a little bit easier. So I think by the time I'm done presenting, you'll have a very good working knowledge of the way the system operates and whether you're just here for the CPE, if you're looking at maybe doing a comparison of what you're doing today and maybe find something better. Regardless of why you're here, I hope you enjoy it. So I break this into two distinct pieces. The first five to seven minutes, I'm just gonna show you some slides as a brief introduction into pro into pro series. And at that point, I'm going to then share my screen, and we will dig into the live program as I take you through the ProSeries workflow. If you have any questions at all, there is a q and a panel that you can access. Pop your questions in there, and we have representatives available here to answer your q and a. So if you have something you wanna ask me or or ask us related to product and how it works and functionality, that's a good place to do it is drop it in the q and a section. Alright. So I'm gonna go ahead and start with my slides. Just a few. The second slide, I like to give you a little bit of background on me. Kevin Reinhard is my name. I am an expert on not just ProSeries, but also our other very popular tax programs. You've probably heard of Lacerte as well as our cloud application that we refer to as ProConnect. But today, we're focusing in on ProSeries. I do a lot of training. I provide content to all of our groups like marketing and tax development. I do lots of these webinars, and oftentimes, I'll fly around the country and speak to different state societies on subject matter related to technology. I've been with Intuit for a very long time, as you can see, and, you know, I've had pretty much every job, sales, marketing, product management, and now a senior solution specialist. The only thing I haven't done that doesn't really interest me is doing tax development where those are the people that are really key to our success. They're the ones who decipher the instructions on the forms, do all the math coding so that you have up to date and accurate software. The next slide is our agenda. What am I going to cover specifically today? So the first thing I'm gonna do when we finish with the slides is I'm gonna open up ProSeries, and I'm gonna take you from one end of it to the other. How do we do data entry? How do you review tax returns? Kinda take you through the workflow, and then we'll flip into showing you some of the more popular time saving tools. And then we'll have a little discussion on electronic signatures and how that works in ProSeries. We'll show you the tax planning tools that are available in ProSeries. And then finally, you know, I talk to firms all the time. Some firms are really electronic. They use a portal, and they get clients to upload docs. Some people like mail ins. Some people like drop off. Some people have, you know, all all of the above. But I wanna show you a portal that we include. If you wanna use it in ProSeries, we call it link because we're linking you and your client together, and you can send an engagement letter to be signed. You can send a customized questionnaire, and you can also send a request for documents. And so I'll show you how that process works kind of at the tail end of our meeting today. Okay. Next slide is participating in the webinar. You're here. So, obviously, you were able to connect. Obviously, the audio streams through your computer speakers if you have any issue with that. I think you can also connect via phone. We recommend Chrome or Safari, but if it's working for you, great. But if it isn't working, maybe jump into one of those, browsers. If you have any issues, make sure you've turned off VPN, ad blockers, firewalls, things like that. We are also going to be asking you at the very end a very, very short survey. If you wouldn't mind, we would appreciate it if you take a couple of questions survey just so that we can gauge how we're doing, if you liked it, if you didn't, if you'd like different content potentially. Alright. So this course now this slide needs to be updated. It does qualify for one CPE and one CE credit. So my mistake on the slide. Now to get the credit, there are two things that you must do, and that is I'm gonna ask you four polling questions. Be sure to answer at least three, and be sure that you stay in the call for a minimum of fifty minutes. If you do both of those things, we will deliver your certificate via email, and it generally takes about forty eight hours for those to arrive in your inbox. If you don't see it, first check your spam folder, make sure that it didn't get caught up there. If you have any issues, I'll give you you can see, actually, there's an email address there. If you have any issues at all, protax_training@intuit.com. You can hit us up with an email, and we'll be happy to investigate any issues. Alright. And we again, I mentioned we are going to be doing four polling questions here. So make sure you answer three. There will be a box that pops up on your screen that says the poll is now available. If you don't see that box, on the upper right of your screen, you notice there's a docs in a q and a section. A poll link will also be available as the polls are open. So if you don't see it pop up, go to the top right, click polls, and you'll be able to answer the polling question. And, of course, we always like to provide a disclaimer that this session is educational in nature and should not be construed as tax advice. Alright. So a couple more slides. So why ProSeries? So this program is one of the most widely used applications in the professional tax industry. It is an Intuit product, and you know Intuit because of a lot of the other products that we have, like, you know, QuickBooks, QuickBooks online, TurboTax, Mint, Credit Karma. It's just another in the lineup of Intuit financial products. One of the things users like most is it's very, very simple to understand this program and to do tax returns. So I'll show you that as we as we demonstrate. Now ProSeries is considered a desktop application. Many of our clients are installing it to their local network or their local PCs, and they're using it locally. However, we have lots of clients that use ProSeries in a hosted environment. And hosting is not cloud per se. It's a third party that host your use of ProSeries. So you log in to kind of like this virtual desktop and use it there. Now why do people like that? Well, it makes it really easy because there's no product installation because they do it all. You never have to update your programs, and you know how many updates come out in January as we receive final forms and instructions. So that helps with that. It also helps when you have remote employees. So you could choose either way, desktop or hosted environment. ProSeries also provides very good diagnostics, and I will show you how when you're in the return, how you would find any critical errors, things that would stop the return from being e file and how you would fix those. Lots of other tools as well. You know, if you're doing a business return, you can transfer the k one, data automatically to the ten forty return. We have tools that analyze married filing, joint returns and let you know whether it's better better for them to file separately. And if it is, we have a button that you can click to actually create two married filing separate returns off the joint return. So those are some of the things that we're doing. The last thing is we do have multiple options for you when it comes to document management. I mentioned that we have the feature built in called link, but we also have another product that we that we create called DMS, which is short for document management system. That one is not a portal. It's mostly just for storage. And if you want to use a third party application, which also has storage, but is also a portal that your client can access, we have, for about fifteen years integrated with a very popular program called SmartVault. Alright. So this is the point of the conversation. The polling question is already up. But what is your primary reason for attending the webinar? You've are you here just for the CPE, which we're totally fine with? Exploring new solutions, solving a problem, general interest, or the dreaded other category. So I usually like to give you a full minute to answer each polling question. So once we get up to about a minute, I'm good. I'm gonna do a little countdown to let you know that I'm ending the poll, and I'll do that in about ten seconds. Alright. Here's the countdown. We'll go from five, four, three, two, and one. So we're done with polling question number one. Again, there will be three more polling questions. I'm gonna go ahead and stop sharing here, And I'm going to go to my screen. Give me one sec here. Alright. And just take me a sec here while I pull up the product on my screen. And so, hopefully, everybody can see now on their screen the opening screen of ProSeries professional tax. Now I'm not a tax preparer myself, so I don't have, you know, hundreds and hundreds of clients in my client list. I've created some sample client files that I'm going to use as I do this presentation. This screen in ProSeries is referred to as home base. It's the starting point for everything you're going to do. It's where you see all your existing tax returns. It's where you can e file and lots of other functionality. But let me explain what we're looking at here. This is a list of all my clients listed by the client name, and you can see that the clients are sorted alphabetically. But what's really nice about the home based screen is you can add, I think it's around 350 different things to this screen. So if you wanted to know everybody's business income or loss, if you wanted to know their refund, the amount due, who had alimony paid or received, you can change these columns up in the settings. And as you do returns, we'll auto populate. Because sometimes there are there's a need to find, hey. Which clients have this? Who has a disposition or who has rental properties? Things like that. So it's really helpful for that. Now on the upper left of the screen, you see that little box up there that says home base view. And in that box, it says form ten forty individual. So these are just my individual clients that I'm viewing currently. But if I wanna view my ten forty one clients or ten sixty five, eleven twenty s, I can click on each one of these products. But a lot of people click the button at the bottom and says all tax returns. So that way, you'll see all the returns you've done, whether they're 10 forties, businesses, all on a single screen. In the home base view box is also where you're going to, e file returns and check the status of your e file returns. So you open the home base or excuse me, home base view and go to what we call the e file center. I only have one client queued up for e file, but this is where you would see all the clients marked for e file where you can track the status of the return. So when you transmit returns, this section right here, esignature status excuse me. Return status will start to change right here. So it'll say sent. Once you send it, it'll say accepted. And so every time you transmit returns, we also pull acknowledgments for previously efiled returns. If you don't have any returns to send, there's also a button that you can click at the top to just grab any acknowledgments that might be waiting. But we do it automatically every time you transmit. This is also where you're going to see the electronic signature feature, which is right here in the middle that says esignature actions request. I'll show you later on how you go about using the electronic signature feature if that's something that you're interested in doing. Alright. So before we open up a return and I walk you through that process, If you're on the home base screen and you'd like to just create a brand new client, it's not a preexisting client, all you do is go to the top box up there on the very, very top left that says new client file, and then we ask you what kind of return are you looking to create. So if I'm creating a ten forty or ten sixty five, I would click on that particular product, and we would start. But for this process, I'm gonna use a preexisting client just for time. The client name on an individual return is Brad and Anna Hall. So we open the return by double clicking the name in the list, and then it opens the program. Now when you first begin to create a return in ProSeries, you click that button to add a new return. This is the first screen that comes up, and we refer to this as the federal information worksheet. Some tax programs call this the client information screen, but it's all the basics. So if you come down, the taxpayer and spouse's name, social, occupation, date of birth, we provide fields for tracking contact information. The one that I would definitely put in is an email for both taxpayer and spouse because we use that in a number of areas like electronic signatures. Down a little bit lower is where you would enter their address. Below that is where you'd indicate their filing status. Below that is where you would put in any dependents. So that's kind of, you know, just names, addresses, just creating the client. Now you notice in this top section, there are these buttons that say quick zoom. So there are sections, excuse me, down a little bit lower on this screen. So for example, if your client has always received a a paper check, but now they wanna start doing direct deposit, no problem. Just go to the section that says e file options, click that button or refund options. And right here, you would just go ahead and say, yeah. I want them to get a direct direct deposit, and then we will prompt you for the account, whether it's checking or savings or routing of the account number. K? Now above that, I don't know if you are familiar with this, but some of our clients take advantage of it. We have a feature built in called pay by refund. So if you do a return for someone and you charge them x number of dollars for the return, but they don't have the money to pay you at that moment, you're able to enroll with one of our participating banks. And what happens is the refund gets put in this intermediate bank account. The bank sends you your funds. They take a fee that the client pays, and then they distribute the the remaining money to the client, however they wanna receive it, check, direct deposit, or whatever. There's no fee to use this in ProSeries. It's a nice feature, but you would enroll, and these are the banks that we work with. There's a quick Zoom button where you can enroll with one of our participating banks. So just want you to know it's there. So that's, kinda some of the information on screen number one, what we call, the federal information worksheet. Now when you start creating a return, over on the left, there's a couple ways to do this. We have a section over here that we call common forms. Just we put them in here because we know that these forms are probably gonna show up in 80 to 90% of the tax returns that you prepare. So you'll notice there are w two worksheets. That's where we go to add w twos. All the various types of ten ninety nines, like miscellaneous, r's, g's. Down here, schedule a, b, c, d, and e, those are pretty common. If I wanna do a k one for s corp or partnership or trust, employee business expense. So these are some of the more common things. So let's pretend that I I haven't put anything in yet, but I wanna add a w two to the return. We go to the left. We click w two worksheet. Now this box came up because I already have two w twos, excuse me, in this return. Normally, if there were no w twos, it would have just dropped me right on the w two screen. So I'm gonna open up the city of Fort Worth, and here's where we enter the employer information at the top. Down here is where, you know, it looks like a w two. K? So we're done entering w two data. Now I wanna go and fill out schedule a because they wanna itemize deductions. I just click on schedule a. Now you probably noticed is when when I bring up these forms like schedule a, schedule c, schedule e, it looks very much like the form. That's why oftentimes, ProSeries is referred to as a forms input system because you're essentially filling out the IRS forms and then being able to see the bottom line of the form. The other thing that's real helpful too is there's no calculation necessary. As you enter data in ProSeries, we are calculating the return in the background all the time. So if you scroll to the bottom of the schedule a, you would see their total itemized deductions. Bottom of schedule c, their income or loss from the schedule c. The other thing that this auto calking provides you is in the upper right of the screen, there's a little button. It does not a button. There's just it says refund $3,990. We call this the refund monitor. So as you enter data, this number is continually changing every time you move off of a field. So the example is I go back to the w two screen. I pull up city Of Fort Worth. If I wanna change the federal tax withheld to $12,000, watch how quickly that refund monitor changes. Now their refund is $59.90. So you always have that up there in in case your client's like, hey. What's my refund right now? Hey. You're looking pretty good, but we're not quite done. Alright. So that's how you add the common forms to a tax return. Now if you have something that is not listed in the common forms, you can scroll this bar down just a bit, and we list all of the screens available by the section. So all your income screens are here. Right? All of your adjustments like your IRAs and SEPs, $39.00 3, like moving expenses, under deductions, all the deductions screen. So you can pick up everything down here that you want, and this is gonna be a combination of things that are common and things that are not so common. Now I like to use the keyboard. I'm a really big keyboard person. So if you like to use your keyboard and not have to click in the left to add forms and schedules, hit the f six key on your keyboard. This box comes up. It's a list of every possible input screen that you would use in in a pro or, excuse me, in ProSeries. So all you start doing is just start typing what you want. So if I wanna go to schedule a, I type the letter a. It puts me right on schedule a, and I press the enter key, and now I'm on a. If I wanna go hit f six and I wanna go 2106, it'll pull it up. Press enter. Our clients have memorized these, obviously, and and you'll know what to type because the blue lettering is what you start to type. Right? So if it's interest, it's I n t. If it's, you know, schedule d, type d kinda thing. So it's a really nice way to navigate via keyboard. The other thing is if you're ever you know, if you're a new user or even if you've been using the program a while and you're having difficulty finding what you want, which isn't that difficult, we also provide a button in the upper left of the screen that says, where do I enter? It's really helpful. So it brings up a box and and says search. Right? So if I'm searching for the field for alimony, I type alimony, and here's where I would click to enter alimony paid. Or you could also just go in here and say, wanna find the $24.41, child dependent care expenses. So you do have a nice search capability that will search all of the screens for either forms or, you know, text. So that's nice, pretty cool. Now I hid something from you on the left hand side of the screen, not because I'm I'm a bad person, but I just wanted to show you and let you feel how it is to add a new return. But above the common forms list, I'm gonna expand this button up here. It's called forms in use. So as you begin to add your forms and schedules and worksheets, we create this list of everything that you've already done. So this is really where you're gonna navigate most. So think about it. If you did a return in 2024 pro series, you transfer all those client files over to 2025, and you open that return for the very first time next year, this list will already be there based on all the data that transferred from the prior return. So if you wanna update their w two, click the w two screen. All the employer data will automatically transfer from the prior year, but, of course, the numbers won't, and you would just update those. Go to schedule b to update the interest and dividends. Go to schedule a to update their itemized deductions. This is really your primary navigation point. Alright? So that's kind of the layout of this. The common forms, by the way, also include not just the forms, but any worksheets that might be available. So if you look under schedule b over there, underneath that, it says interest and dividend summary. So this is telling you, hey. Is it flowing to the b from a k one? Is it been entered directly on schedule b part one or part two? So it's kind of a breakdown of that. Or if you have multiple w twos, we create a w two worksheet that tie that, you know, totals up all your w twos. Under schedule e on the left so if I click on it, it takes me to schedule e. But if I've entered assets, not only will I be able to see the asset entry worksheet for this condominium, but I'll also be able to also access the depreciation report for that as well. And you'll notice a little further down, we do a two year comparison on forms like schedule e, schedule f, schedule c, where the client can see, okay, what was all the rental last year, what was it this year this year, last year, and then there's a column over on the right that says the difference. Now if you just wanna see a summary of the return, like, what we call the tax summary or a two year comparison, it's down on the left in the forms in use. These are automatic. So we have this tax, two year comparison. So this is '23, '24, a difference shown as a dollar value and a percentage. We also generate one that clients really like. We call it a tax history report. So I've only done this client for three years. But if I had done them for five, this is a report that can be printed with a return, and I can give my clients so they can see, oh, look how my tax situation has changed over multiple years. So that's really helpful as well. Alright. So I'm gonna move on to a couple of specific things. I'm gonna go to schedule e, and I'm gonna scroll down the form. Again, it it's just the schedule e form, and I entered 28,000, $500 in total rental income. Down here, I've entered some expenses. Now I wanna show you a few features. I show them to you on schedule e, but these features are available anywhere on any form. So the first one is the ability to put a note on a field. So you'll notice on advertising, there's a little pencil icon in the upper right. That's because I right clicked my mouse and I said, wanna add or edit a note, and I just put in this as a note. Pretty good. Right? So this is a note, but you can you can make notes on any specific field that you want because it's related to that field, and you'll see a pencil icon. Now later on, when we look at the diagnostics, I'll also show you that there's a way to click a notes button and have all the notes come up so that you can review them, and you don't have to go back through all the screens to find them. The other thing that you might have to do from time to time is put a number in and mark it as an estimated number. Like, they tell you their advertising expense they think is $2,500, but they're not very sure. So when you put a number in, you can right click your mouse and you can say mark as estimated. And it'll change the dynamics of the field. It puts a red background on it and red lettering. K? Now when you do it on, like, when you mark things as estimates, we do treat those as a critical error. And and if you go to e file this return, if you haven't cleared that that marking, then we're not gonna let you e file. And I'll show you later how you would understand where you put certain things in and mark them as estimates. So that's another really valuable feature. Now you might have a schedule e where the client has depreciation on the schedule e. Now how would you enter assets? What you do is you go to the form, depreciation line where there's $10,000, put a little button with a magnifying glass next to it. Click on that. And it brings up a list of all the assets that are currently associated with this schedule e. So if I wanna open this one I created called asset two, I open it. K? This is called the asset entry worksheet. All we need is a description, date, place, and service cost, and then there's a drop down menu where you select the type of assets. So in this case, I just said it was rental furnishings. K? Now what's nice is if you scroll down the form, you'll see a button down here that says quick zoom to asset life history. We do generate depreciation schedules, but we also if you click this, we will show you an asset life history schedule that shows you the assets over, you know, all the years of its life. So that's a nice thing to have as well. K? So that's how I enter assets. I just go, you know, to the to schedule e. I click the line that says depreciation. I add my asset. And then when I go back to schedule e, that will update the number directly on the form. That's how that works. Now there's also a really good function as it relates to sometimes someone's gonna say, hey. I lost my Social Security statement. I can't find it, or I don't know this or that, or maybe you just wanna mark something to remind yourself about something. And what we what we refer to that in the program is missing information. So let's say they don't have they don't know what their commissions are, but you wanna mark that field so you can keep track of it. What you do is you right click the field again. Instead of marking it as an estimate, you use this one that says add or edit missing client information. And you see how that little box pops up in the upper left? What it's doing is it automatically adds it to a list of things that you're tracking. K? So it's really nice to be able to kinda mark them all off. Now the other part about this feature in addition to to tracking that information, you can also click this button on the right that says, you can print this or email it, and we automatically set it up. We've already created the email here. As long as your client's email addresses are in there, you can click email and shoot them off an email with any missing information, or maybe you just wanna track it for your your own purposes. Or if you just wanna print it because they're in the office because you see clients face to face, go ahead and pop the print button as well. So that's a nice way to kinda keep track of things that, you know, you think are are worthy of that. Alright? So that's what what did we learn on this area, how we can mark things as estimated amounts, how we can leave notes on particular fields, how we can link to things like depreciation, or if I was doing automobiles and and adding automobiles and linking to the schedule e, I can click here and it says select an existing car, but I'll just put in here car as my car, and you can have up to three vehicles per page. Put in the actual versus the mileage, whatever is more advantageous. We're gonna take that number and bring it over to schedule e. K? So that's how it works. Now another thing in data entry, which I really love, is the ability like, if you notice when I'm on the car and truck expense, how it says date, place, and service, and there's a red field. Whenever you're on a a form, we're gonna tell you with these red backgrounds what are the required fields that you you have to fill out. So it's almost like leading you through the data entry on a return. So if I put in a date, place, and service of 2024, watch what happens. All the other fields that I need to fill out, it's telling me exactly what I need to do. These are all considered critical errors, so I have to fill out everything on that schedule eform or the vehicle expense sheet. So it's really cool. Now what if I don't want if I wanna remove this car and truck expense worksheet, because maybe I was supposed to put it on schedule c and schedule sched instead of schedule e or whatever. You go to the left hand side of the screen, hover over the car and truck expense worksheet section, and right click your mouse. Remove the car and truck expense worksheet for car. Yes. And then to make sure you're really sure you wanna do this, it'll say, you really sure you wanna do it? Hit yes, and then it gets removed from this from the list. Alright. The last thing I wanna show you, I think you understand at a very high level, like, how this functions, but I'd also like to point out how we handle the program diagnostics. And then we're gonna ask the the next polling question. So let me give you an example of the way the diagnostics operate. So I'm gonna go back to the information worksheet in my left list because that was the first form I filled out. And I'm gonna go in here, and I'm going to remove the occupation from Brad. Delete it. Notice how the field turns red. What it's telling me, just like we did on the rent or on the vehicle screen, is this is a required entry on this particular form. And if I don't put something in there, I can't e file it. Now how does the program let me know about this red field instead of having to go back through every single screen and find them? Look on the left hand side. You see it next to information worksheet, it says one error. Well, that's what it's telling me. I've got an error right here. Schedule e, I've got one error there. So the beauty of this product, because it's auto calculating, is anytime you're missing something, you're gonna see these little links on the left that show you where your errors are. So all you have to do is go ahead and click the error here. And in this example, it said, this is marked as estimated. Enter the correct number and then select unmark estimate. Okay. The client finally gave me the figure of 3,000. I right click. I say, unmark the estimate. See how the error code automatically disappears. Because we're calculating, you don't have to hit calculate. Go to the top, click on information worksheet, click that error. Oh, it puts me directly on the field for occupation. And I'll say he's in sales. Boom. I'm done. That's how I clear my errors. So for me, I, you know, I I look at a lot of the competitive software, a lot of good products out there. But a lot of times, diagnostics are like this secondary process where I have to calculate, go to a whole separate section of the program, click a diagnostic where it brings me back. I fix it, but I'm kind of jumping back and forth. But because of the auto calculation, you don't have to do that. You can just click, click, click, click, and clean things up really, really fast. Now last thing I wanted to show, two things, is I mentioned that you can put notes on particular fields. There is also a general notes section that you can use if it's not tied to a field specifically. Excuse me. So I'm gonna go to a screen on the left called client status. So by the way, on the home base screen that I showed you, one of the columns that I have out there is called client status. So if you want to mark the return as a at a different status. So let's say as you're doing tax prep, you just completed their interview. You click interview completed, and it says the date that you completed it. And up here, the current status is now marked as interviewed. So if I go back to my home base screen for this client in that column, it's gonna say they were interviewed. So I can mark final. I can mark on extension. It's a nice way to keep track of all your returns. But I was mentioning the notes. Down here at the bottom, we have these two sections called current year comments and permanent comments. You're smart. You understand the difference. Current year means any comments I put in here are just for the 2024 tax return. Anything that are considered permanent comments are things that will roll to the next year and the year after and the year after and the year after. So not only can you leave field notes, but you can also leave, current year comments and permanent comments. Alright? So that's our tax return. That's the flow. I'm gonna go ahead and save this return and go back to the home base screen. I'm going to stop sharing because I would like to now talk a little bit about, electronic signatures. And before doing that, I would like to ask you the next polling question of the day. This is poll question two, which is already up, is how frequently do you use electronic signature technology with your clients today? So not at all, more than 25%, more than 50%, great. And some of you, for all your clients, which is really great. You know, if you've never tried this, I would at least give it a try. You know, a lot of people use different products for electronic signatures. Some people use Adobe, which is a fantastic product, but it's not that automated. And what I mean is you will have to create a PDF of your eighty eight seventy nines and save them on your computer, upload those into that product, then the product doesn't really know where the signatures go or where the date fields are supposed to go. So every single time, you've gotta do the work of putting the fields on those forms, federal and state, and it's kind of monotonous. We do all of that, and I'll show you how this works in just a sec. So I'm gonna do a countdown now from five, four, three, two, and one. So thank you for taking polling question number two. I'm going to stop sharing now and go back to my screen share for ProSeries. Give me just a sec. And here's ProSeries. So how do we do an electronic signature in ProSeries? Remember, in the e file section, upper left home based view box, I go to what we call the e file center. K? Now it opens up the screen. Again, I only have one client marked for e file, but you'd see all your clients in this list. If I wanna get a signature for Brad and Anna Hall before I e file the return, there's a button right here that says request. Click that button. Now the first thing the program is gonna do, it's gonna check and check for errors in the return. Because if there are critical errors, we don't want you to send an electronic signature. We won't let you do it. So that means so because it popped up this box, it means all my errors are cleared. So I have a choice here. I can just get signatures on the e file authorization forms, but you can attach those forms. And if you wanna send another form, like maybe a power of attorney, you have the ability to send anything through esignature. But we're just gonna use the authorization forms only. Now this is gonna take a sec because what it's doing is creating a PDF of all those forms. Right? So in this return, I think I just had a a federal return. But if I had, you know, Arizona, Kansas, Alabama, it knows what forms to ask for. And once it creates the PDF, it's gonna pull up a box on my screen, and this is where I'm going to go ahead and send the esignature request. It's coming up right now. So if you look at the very top, it says here are the documents that are going to the client. Here are the clients and their email addresses. Here's a reminder. So the reminder is gonna go out to them every one day. Right? Because and and you can change this, but I like to nag clients. So every twenty four hours, they're gonna get a a new email saying, hey. We really need you to sign. We need you to sign. There's also a very nice option right here that says include a client copy of the return. So we use DocuSign as our partner. You do not does not require that you have a license for DocuSign. All we're doing is we're wrapping up the documents, sending them through DocuSign as an email so your client can open them up on their mobile device and sign by clicking their using their finger. But including the client copy is helpful because it gives them something they can actually look at. Right? How do I authorize my return if I don't have the return to look at? So make sure that box is clicked and send it, But just go down to the bottom and hit the send button. That's the whole process. So it's like two two clicks. One, to create the PDFs. Two, hit send, and off they go. That's the esignature kind of end to end. Now in the right hand side, we do show you this little box. This is a preview of what your client will see when they get the email. It's and you see where it says your firm name has sent you a document to review and sign. I know it's kinda small. Your firm name is gonna show up in there as well as the email address of the person that actually sent the esignature request. So your client will know they're not getting spammed because it does have some personalization for them. Now one thing you should also be aware of is when you send an esignature to a client, we have to authenticate them. The way that we authenticate the client is when they go to open it, we're gonna ask them three questions. You cannot change the questions. We get these based on old credit histories and things. And you've probably seen this through DocuSign before. It'll be questions like, according to your driver's license, what color are your eyes? And it will list five colors, and I would pick Hazel. What's your father's middle name? My dad's middle name is Arthur, so I would pick Arthur. We ask them three questions. They only have to get two of them correct to be able to open and sign. So it is not a sticking point. But from time to time, you'll have a client that doesn't know their credit history and will blow it. So you could void that request and send it send them another one and give them another shot at it if you want. Now the probably the one of the best things too about the electronic signature feature is your ability to understand whether or not the clients are actually signing these documents. And where do we find that? At the top of the screen in ProSeries, there's a little button up there that says dashboard. This is called the e signature dashboard. This will show you all the requests that you've sent and tell you the actual status. Again, I don't use this because I'm not a preparer, but this is where it would show that it was signed or maybe it was partially signed because maybe the spouse signed and the taxpayer hasn't signed yet. Your statuses are up at the top. It'll tell you if you have any people that have declined, who failed to authenticate, how many are expired, how many are done. So if you have a list of 200 here and all you wanna know are the ones that are done, you can click up here, signature completed, and all it will show you are the ones that have completed. If they fail, click authentication failed, and the client will show up, and the action on a failed authentication would be void it. So you could void the request, send them another one. So there's a really good ability to keep track. DocuSign is feeding this information back into ProSeries pretty consistently. So that's how you do electronic signatures. Not a really tough thing to do. So let's go back to the individual view. Alright. I'm gonna ask the next polling question right now. I'm gonna go ahead and stop sharing because I wanna make sure that I get all these in in the right amount of time. So the next polling question is give me just a sec. It should already be up on your screen. And this is really related to how do you like to do data entry. What is your preferred method of data entry? You like the forms based like ProSeries, or do you want something that's more category based? Like, if you look at products in the industry that are category based would be Lacerte and ProConnect from our pro from Intuit, CCH, Thomson Reuters, Drake, they're more for they're not so forms based. Your forms based products are gonna be more like ProSeries, ATX, Tax Wise, and some of these other programs out there. So, yeah, let us know. Alright. I'm gonna give it about another ten seconds, and then I'm going to do the little countdown that I do from five, four, three, two, and one. Closing poll question three. Thank you for answering that. I'm going to go back to my screen share, and we're gonna jump back into ProSeries again. Okay. So I I mentioned that I was gonna talk about tax planning, and I remembered that I failed to do that when I was in the return. But let me show you the functions or the availability of being able to do some projections for clients. So if we reopen the return for Brad and Anna, on the left hand side of the screen, at the very bottom of my forms in use list, I see this thing called the tax planner because I've already added the planning screens to my tax return. But what I do is I click on this. So when you want to and, actually, let me let me remove it so I can show you how this works from scratch. I'm gonna remove all those forms. So you can go to the where do I enter button to and just type in tax planning, or you can go down to the very bottom left of the screen where there's a section called miscellaneous and you can click on planning. K? And then you'll see a section in here that says, I think I remember how to do this. Sorry. There's one here that says tax planner. Here we go. So you can create up to four distinct different tax plans for a client here. So when you open the screen up, it says, enter a short description for the planning that you're the plan that you're creating. I'll just call this plan one. So what happens is it takes you to the screen called the tax planning worksheet. It brings in the number from the numbers from the return that you are currently doing. These are all the twenty twenty four numbers, and you can see all the way down through taxable income and their overpayment or their balance due. K? So that would be their refund. Now I wanna do a projection. I wanna do a projection for '25 and '26. So I go to the top, and there's a drop down menu. You say, I wanna do a plan for 2025, and I wanna do a plan for 2026. Now I've got three years. We've taken the data from column one and applied it to those other years. So let's say in 2025, the client is considering a a small business, and they think their T shirt business is gonna make $30 in the first year, and they wanna know the effect of that. So you just go over to that column, click the button, and then put in the amount of the business income that's anticipated, $30,000. Now if you go back to the main summary, you're gonna see that we've increased. We've added 30,000 in column two. We've increased our total income by 30 k, so it's now $2.51. And if I scroll down to the bottom, here's the difference. Well, looks like last year, you got a refund of this with your new business. Now you're gonna see a balance due of $34.89. Of course, we haven't put in any expenses or assets, anything like that, but it's kind of a good starting point. So this is available to use. You can create up to four plans. The other one that's available is this one called a what if worksheet. What this is really designed to do is not so much allow you to change a bunch of stuff, but you can go down here and say and I'm gonna uncheck this box just for right now. You can go up here and you it pulls in the data from column number one just like it did, 2024 data. And you can say, I wanna run a plan using next year's tax rates. Boom. Why do why would you use this? Because somebody might say, hey. You just did my return. I got a $3,000 refund. Assuming nothing changes next year, can you give me an anticipation of what I'm gonna pay next year? Are there tax law changes, the BBB? Like, how's that gonna affect me? So that's all you do. You just come in here. You check the box to use next year's tax rates, scroll down to the bottom, and we're gonna show you the difference in two years assuming that there has been no changes or, you know, minor things that might be changed. So that's the difference. We have the tax planner, and we also have what we call the what if worksheet, which is also extremely popular. Alright. So I'm gonna go back out to my main screen. And the last thing that I want to show you today is the portal that we include in ProSeries, free of charge. And I mentioned earlier, we have three document opportunities in ProSeries. You can use the link portal. You can use our own product called document management system. That one is strictly I'm storing documents. I'm scanning their source docs. I'm saving copies of returns out of ProSeries directly to document management. I don't necessarily need it to be a portal. The third option is a third party that we've been working for, as I mentioned, for about fifteen years called SmartVault. We have the same level of integration. So in ProSeries, you can tell the program, hey. Every time I print a client copy of the return, I don't wanna have to save the PDF. I want it to go directly to SmartVault. It automatically knows what client, what year, and what folder to drop it in in SmartVault. So you can set that up when you're setting doing the settings in ProSeries. But today, I'm gonna show you this one called link. Alright. So how do we invite a client to the portal? Right on your screen in ProSeries, there's a column that says, we call it Intuit link, and you click this little invite button right here. And what's gonna happen is this little box is gonna pop up on my screen. And what it's asking me is what do I want to populate the portal with? And there are two options. One is a checklist. What that means is it's gonna ask them for documents. And how do we know what documents to ask for? We look at their prior return. So when you send the request to them, it's not just gonna say, hey. Upload all your documents. It's gonna literally say, please upload your Intuit w two, your ten ninety nine from Alliant Credit Union, your dividends from E*TRADE, your k one from whatever, your home mortgage interest, your Social Security. So it knows. So it sends a different request based on the client prior year return. The other option that you can choose to do is send them a questionnaire. This is a questionnaire that we give you. That's a template that if you don't like some of the questions, you can remove them, or you can add your own questions to it. And you can make questions that are simple, yes or no. Or if you wanna verify their address, you could create a question, what's your current address, and make it open ended so there's a box that they can type. K? So all you do is you decide what you're sending, you hit this button, and you send it. Now I'm going to show you now what does the taxpayer see when you pull that up. So I'm gonna go ahead and do another screen share just real quick here. Sharing out Intuit link. So when the client gets the email from you, the first thing that's gonna happen is we're gonna take them to a screen and ask them to create their own custom username and password. Once they create that, we're gonna send the multifactor authentication code, and then they take that code and type it in. So we do make sure that's very secure for the client. We do ask them to do that. But here's what the client sees on the portal. We've tried to keep this real simple. So here's the and by the way, I also can send an engagement letter, which I didn't mention. You can send an engagement letter, the questions, and the document checklist. So you click engagement letter. Here it is. And at the bottom, John already signed it back on May 7. But, normally, this would be a blank box that would say, please type your name here to sign. So the type client types their name, and then they click go back to the main page. Then they open up their custom questionnaire with all the questions. And what's your current address? That's yes or no. This one's open ended. And you also see over here I always like to point this out because I think it's a neat feature. You see how some of these have padlocks on them. So what that means is when this information comes back to you and you log in to see what the client has done, you're able to lock responses. Clients asked us for this because what they don't want is the client giving us a response and then changing it once you've determined that's what you're gonna use, you know, to complete the return. So you can lock responses so they can't change things after they initially give you the information. You could always unlock them if you want. And then the last option is where you see the checklist of documents. This is a a specific checklist based on what John had in his prior year return, and I haven't been in there in a while, so it's requiring that I log in again. Okay. So third option, document checklist. And down here at the bottom is everything that John had in his prior year return. He has a w two from Intel. He's got an ints from each Alliant and E Trade and dividends and k ones and mortgage interest. So how does the client go about getting these documents to you? There are multiple options, but the most popular option is when they're on their phone or on their iPad or their mobile device, they can click on the item. And as soon as they click this button, share a document, we enable the camera on that device. They can simply snap photos of all their documents, makes it easy. If they don't have a camera on their device because they're on a computer like a Mac or a PC, then they would click and maybe they've scanned it. Right? They can click share, and then they can click upload, and then we're gonna browse the computer. Wherever they stored that document from the scan, they're gonna grab it and import it. The third option is also very helpful. You're gonna have clients that misplace their ten ninety nine from E*TRADE, or maybe they don't know. They've gone on the E*TRADE website, and they can't find where the tax documents are located, so they call you. So instead of doing that, your client can click and say share. And instead of upload, we give them a button that says get it for me. And we have relationships with over 200 banks, brokers, and w two providers in this list. If your client's an E*TRADE person, they would click E*TRADE, and they would put in their login ID and password. It's all secure because they've logged in, and this blue button would then be enabled. They can click it, and it will go out to E*TRADE. It knows we want that ten ninety nine INT, and it will import it right into the into a link feature. So your client has multiple options. Now I do get questions sometimes. It'll say, Kevin, what if my client has trouble with this? They don't really understand how to use it. They don't really have problems, but if they do, just direct them to this button right here that's a minute and a half video that they can watch on how to use link. Or if they would prefer, they can click this button to download a PDF that's, like, step by step instructions on how to use it. So I'm not gonna go into the last part, which is where do you see the documents, but I will say that there's a website that you can access through ProSeries, and I'll show you where it's at. Give me just a sec while I reshare again. Screen share. ProSeries. Share. Sorry. It takes just a sec to do this. Okay. So in ProSeries, if you wanna access all of those documents, all of those questions that they've answered, and all of that, you would go to the tools menu up here, and you would say go to Intuit link. It's a completely separate website that we give you. You're gonna see all the clients that have invited or accepted your invitation. And when you open that client, it's gonna show you that list of documents, the list of questions. And on the right, there's a response column. So it'll either be the answer to one of their questions, or it'll be the PDF document attached that you can open and do tax prep with. So it's a really good function. Alright. I'm gonna stop sharing for the last time in ProSeries. I'm gonna go back to the screen share. So just give me my slides. Excuse me. And we're going to talk about a couple of things now. Oh, before I do that oh, the last poll question, I'm gonna wait on that. But let me just open up this slide right here. I wanna talk a little bit about because I do get questions on training opportunities and information that you might want around ProSeries. So we have these couple of things here. One is called an education center. So as a ProSeries customer, you have access to this. We have these live webinars like what I'm doing now. We also have recorded webinars. None of them cost anything. We do virtual conferences during the year. We'll do things on, like, tax advisory. We'll have a two day event. You can sign up for for credit. No cost. There are self paced modules that you can take. And under the Tax Pro Center, we always update that with relevant articles. Like, we have a ton of articles out there on the new BBB. The next area I wanted to discuss was the accountant support. So you can go into the support area. You can, of course, call us on the phone, and we'll answer your questions. But this is a way where we seed this section with, like, some of the most common questions that we get, like, how do I do a like kind exchange? And it will give you instructions on how to do that. I would also check out the community. This is a really nice area because we have thousands of ProSeries users in the community. They're answer they're asking each other questions because we don't provide tax advice. They might talk about tax specific things among themselves. Or if there's a feature or a function that you think, hey. I came from this other vendor, and they have this. I like it. You can add your own feature functionality or your your suggestion, and then users vote on it. So you'll see this one, and it's got a 175 votes because everybody thinks that's a fantastic idea. So, again, you can use all of these different tools. The other thing is we do provide for new customers, we really wanna help you because we want you to have success. And the only way you're gonna do that is if you're trained on the product, if you've had an opportunity to get your data converted because we convert client files from all the leading vendors out there. We make that process real simple. So we take you through a a thing called easy start, which is kind of like our process for bringing on a new customer on board. We have people that we will assign to your account. They will set up Zoom meetings with you. It's really great. So we don't wanna leave anything to chance. We wanna make sure that you have as much success as possible. Alright. So I'm gonna ask polling question number four. This is just kinda gauging your level of interest. Would you like a personalized sales demo or a consultation about what you've learned? So even if you don't say, yeah, I'd really like to get a consultation, on the last slide I'm about to show you, I will give you a number that you can dial. So if you want real specific pricing, if you want to get a copy of the program to try out for yourself, we make the twenty twenty four program available as a trial. It's a full working product other than if you try to efile or print, we won't let you until, you know, you actually sign up. So but the trial's great. You know, you can do an individual or a business return and really put it through its paces to make sure that it's something that that you like. Alright. Thank you. This is poll question four. Thank you. Hopefully, you've all been able to answer three of the four polling questions. We are fifty six minutes into this. So if you've been here the whole time, you've satisfied your time requirement. And I'm gonna give it about another ten seconds, and then we'll do a little countdown from five, four, three, two, and one. So that concludes the polling questions. Final slide. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed the content today. I realize I don't go through everything that maybe you wanted to see, but I base these on conversations and prior demos that I do to understand, like, what people really wanna see. So if you have, any questions, you want more information, or you wanna try it, you want pricing, I've given you a number that you can dial. It's (833) 239-5787. That will get you directly to one of our consultants. I promise they're not pushy. They're just there to answer questions and, you know, help you out in any way that they can. Alright. Well, that concludes our demonstration of ProSeries Professional Tax. Thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate your time. Hope you have a great filing season this tax year. It's coming. It's it's it's right upon us. So we're getting the forms and instructions all done, and the program is looking really good. So we're very excited about the 2025 filing season. Thanks so much, everyone, and, all the best. Bye bye.