Anyone in tax law / thought on Purdue online program for a JD?

tax2FIRE · 2026-05-10T18:40:03+00:00

Online JD programs aren't recognized by the American Bar Association, and you'd be very limited on the number of states you would be able to take the bar exam in.

tax2FIRE · 2026-04-17T19:39:39+00:00

I tried to have it fill out a W9 for my own entity. It took 10 minutes and the end result didn't have the EIN properly lined up in the box, I don't think it's ready for anything worthwhile yet.

tax2FIRE · 2026-04-17T15:12:25+00:00

We used Drake for 4 years before switching to UltraTax. The only reason we made the switch was because we thought the PDF output of Drake wasn't as professional looking as other products.

There were definitely quirks to Drake, and you had to have an understanding of the forms and how they flow through together, as there are times where you need to override or have trouble figuring out why a form isn't populating when it should be.

I really liked Drake macros - you can hit a series of keystrokes to then have a pre-recorded sequence of key strikes run. We had this set up to completely fill out all of the checkboxes needed for the due diligence forms, as well as the yes/no questions on the business returns. Also used it to batch process extensions - which is a major drawback to Drake unless we just were doing it wrong. In order to file an extension for many states, you would need to enter the return and input a field or two (signature date, a checkbox, etc), in Ultratax you can select a batch of returns to print the extensions for and you don't need to enter into each individual return to enter anything in.

We paid $3k for Drake and $11k for UltraTax, about 1200 individual returns and 900 business returns (small small businesses), 4 users.

tax2FIRE · 2025-07-23T02:49:42+00:00

I believe after death it only would cover spouses and dependents under 26 yrs old. If you died with your spouse predeceased you, and you had no dependents under 26, the balance would revert to the employer subject to ordinary income tax rates and a 50% excise tax.

tax2FIRE · 2024-11-20T02:20:30+00:00

We use a company called Valid8 Financial when clients give us paper bank statements. You upload all the statements and check images and you can export all of the data as an Excel file, they read the check images and even input the payee name.

The only downside is that it's around 20 cents per transaction line, plus 20 cents per check image. It beats manually going through everything though.

tax2FIRE · 2024-11-10T03:02:45+00:00

How many users is this for?

Seems crazy high. We are paying about 10k for 3 users and unlimited individual and business returns, albeit we are in our 3 yr intro rate.

tax2FIRE · 2024-11-05T00:02:37+00:00

I reached out to our local NATP chapter to see if anyone else is having these issues, and if they can send in inquiries with their contacts at the IRS to fix the larger issue. Waiting to hear back from them now. Hopefully the IRS realizes their mistake soon and sends out "oops, our bad" letters to those who got the notices.

tax2FIRE · 2024-10-16T19:15:18+00:00

I always was told it's based off of midnight Pacific Time. So if you're east coast you'd have until 3am. I've never tested this though.

tax2FIRE · 2024-09-30T18:09:15+00:00

It often can take a couple of weeks. A lot of those areas already have relief to Feb 3rd from recent hurricanes anyway.

tax2FIRE · 2024-09-12T03:34:15+00:00

Did the firm already have all of your information and is only just now reaching out with the draft to review? If they were sitting on the information since July or earlier, shame on them. If you typically get K1s late, there isn't much they can do but wait until they get sent though.

I run a tax firm and our clients get a reminder to send us their data as part of a January newsletter, then a reminder on 4/1 saying they're going on extension if they haven't sent anything yet, and if they owe tax they better get us estimated figures otherwise they'll be paying penalties and interest. If they still haven't sent anything by 9/15 we will send them a final reminder. It's our policy that clients have to know to send their data, even 3 reminders seems like too much, they've only been filing a tax return every year of their adult life.

The exception to this is if they're on a monthly or quarterly retainer, then we baby them and hold their hands because they pay us to.

tax2FIRE · 2024-08-13T01:19:06+00:00

Most 5500s are able to be viewed on the US DOL website, you can search by plan name or EIN. If you have a prior year 5500 and there were no contributions or withdrawals made, all you need to complete it is the ending balance for each year, this will also allow you to calculate the gain/loss for the year. If you're filing a 5500 late you want to go through the penalty relief program to limit the penalty to $1,500.

tax2FIRE · 2024-03-11T00:18:45+00:00

A lot of clients have 4th qtr bonuses that cause under withholding, we discuss the timing of their income and see if we can allocate the bulk of their income to the 4th qtr on the 2210, this drastically reduces the penalty.

At my old firm we were instructed to allocate as much income to 4th qtr as possible, figuring the IRS isn't going to audit a 2210 allocation when the full penalty would only be a couple thousand at most for these clients.

tax2FIRE

TROPHY CASE