With tax classes starting up, I see all types of students who come with all sorts of expectations in what they want out of learning how to be a tax professional. By tax professional, I mean certified in doing Federal income tax forms (basic ones at any rate) and California ones. Some students come in with an open mind, some come in with an open hand and expect to get certified without any work. After the first one or two sessions there is usually some dropping out and thinning of the herd. The reasons vary from the work or the fact that they really didn’t want to learn how to prepare taxes.
The best way to prepare how to do taxes is to have a little familiarity with money, if nothing else. Skills required are patience, fondness with working with numbers, ability to work with people and enjoying mind numbing details and boring laws. If you can stomach all of that you are home free. Expect that some parts of the class will be easier for you than others. If you are use to doing your own research with the Federal government and all the respective state tax authorities, you are already ahead of the game. Depending on where you take the class, the next obstacle is learning the software, which, if you have a good teacher, shouldn’t be a problem.
Bring blank paper, pens and pencils and a cheap calculator. They are available at places like the 99 cents store or Dollar Tree for a dollar. Can’t go wrong with that and the math tends to be simple addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. You will learn about appropriate rounding in tax class. Depending on what state you are in, there will be different requirements for passing. For my money, in order to be a profitable tax professional, make sure you take a class from somebody where you actually get to do tax returns. There is a lot more to tax preparation than multiple choice or true false answers. When you are interviewing a client to get information, you need to know the correct question to ask and not expect a test formatted answer!
A couple of other tips – if the instructor doesn’t want to answer a particular questions right away, that is normal. It may be out of scope for what he or she is trying to teach and believe me, there is a lot of information that has to be covered in each session. Wait for the break and ask the teacher than.
Plan on making a commitment. You will not be allowed to miss many classes and information builds upon itself so if you miss class 3, you will need to make it up somewhere else because class 4 may have information in it that you won’t understand.
Have faith in yourself and expect to spend time and effort and you will pass your tax class. Hey, I wasn’t always a tax professional, businessman, manager and teacher. I also still consider myself a student learning something new all the time. When it comes to tax law, to be be closed to learning isn’t very profitable (or smart).
Kim Greenblatt
You are learning from Kim Greenblatt’s blog, profitable, how to be a tax student in tax class.
Tags: being a student, Business, Kim Greenblatt, profitable, tax classes, taxes