Get Experience Preparing Tax Returns

Get Hands-On Experience in Tax Return Preparation

This is one of the biggest hurdles for some people, but happens easily for others. For me personally, I got my first experience by preparing my own tax returns. That was back before computers. All forms were filled out by hand, first in pencil, then in ink.

I had a small lawn maintenance business and each year at tax time I would sit down at my parents' dining-room table with my Dad and spread out all the forms and instructions. We'd spend the better part of a weekend reading form instructions and working our way through the return.

Some tax preparers get their first experience at a tax franchise or at a small local tax return preparation office. Perhaps you have a friend or relative in the business who needs some extra help with the basic returns during crunch time. You might offer to work free for a couple of weeks the first season.

If you are a person who is used to dealing with the public, perhaps because you have experience in other business dealings, and if you are a fairly quick-study, you might be comfortable jumping in with both feet by preparing returns for a modest fee for friends and relatives, then asking for referrals.

I recently met a preparer who was an engineer who got "down-sized" from his company and had to find a second career. He took a tax preparation course and set up shop on a busy road in a fairly small town. After a couple of years he bought the clients of a retiring tax preparer up the street and now he prepares over 600 returns in about 3 months! That's well over $60,000 in just a couple of months. There aren't too many businesses where you can get started and be successful that quickly.

If you are an accounting student in a college, you may be able to get help from the college in finding an internship at a local CPA firm where you can get hands-on experience preparing tax returns from January through April 15th. Most of these internships pay fairly well. I worked one tax season as an intern at a Tampa, Florida CPA firm during my last year of college and it was excellent experience. I think they paid me around $10 an hour. That was quite a few years ago. It was challenging, but I learned a lot.