QuickBooks and taxes are in a bit of a ‘it’s complicated’ relationship, and it’s something I get asked about a lot!

We all want to make filing taxes easier but can QuickBooks do it for you?

QuickBooks is an excellent piece of software that helps private practices and other small businesses in bookkeeping and monitoring cash flow. Butttt, it can’t file your taxes FOR YOU (sorry!)

That’s the quick answer…

But, there are some ways that QuickBooks can HELP you file your taxes. Here’s how:

QuickBooks is a bookkeeping solution that keeps track of your income and expenses. It helps you keep everything in order so that when tax time rolls around you can easily hand it off to a tax professional to save time and money with filing.

Is there another software that can help file taxes?

Since you brought it up, there is a second option from Inuit (the same people who make QuickBooks). TurboTax is a program that works with QuickBooks and lets you take the information from your bookkeeping and import, and print your W-2, W-3, 1099, and 1096 Forms. That said, I HIGHLY suggest you make the investment to have a professional prep and file your taxes. Mistakes made will be more costly to you that it would have been had you just hired a professional in the first place. And more often than not, when clients come to us with previous taxes that they ‘filed themselves’, we end up having to amend and re-do them to fix the mistakes. Just sayin’.

Soooo in summary: QuickBooks can’t FILE your taxes but it can help you around tax time.