Done with another tax year. I was hoping to get it done a little earlier, but at least it wasn’t right up to the wire like it has been sometimes. Every year I have to re-figure some bits of it out.
I have been building my spreadsheet for federal taxes, and every year I add some instructions to hopefully make the next year go smoothly, but always something trips me up. I also still have to look at the instructions, because they change something every year, though nothing important for me this year. I do the Free Fillable Forms, which doesn’t seem to get advertised enough as a free option. It’s just like filling out the paper forms, except that it does many of the calculations, catches some errors, and doesn’t have to be mailed. Anyway, mine got kicked back once this year with two errors:
- I forgot I had to fill out a schedule that isn’t in my spreadsheet because it’s just repeating info from elsewhere. It was hinted in my notes, but I made it more obvious.
- I had a rounding error that made a single value in a single field off by $1. Didn’t affect any other fields. My spreadsheet uses the full numbers with cents, but the forms round to the nearest dollar. For values which have several other values, this can end up being slightly off. I’m not even sure why this field needs to be manually entered, because it is easily calculable from fields in other forms. Line 2a on form 8962 if you’re interested.
After fixing those and resubmitting, it went through fine. I got money back, some of which I put toward next year just to be safe, with my varying income amount.
The Ohio e-file went fine. It’s always a little confusing and has a whole ton of fields on separate schedules that no longer apply to me now that I’m W2 income, but I have to look through them to make sure nothing was added that applies to me. I got money back and put it toward next year except a bit I put to some of the charity options they give. Since it is just a wizard thing, I’m never quite sure if I made a mistake, but I did it to the best of my ability.
Akron has their own e-file site, new last year. It is pretty terrible UI. My taxes are now quite simple for Akron now that I am W2, but the site makes it confusing to enter. They have a file upload function that means I no longer have to mail anything to them, but it is confusing to use. It provides no indicator of whether or what has been uploaded once leaving that screen. The submission process doesn’t give much feedback. Pressing the button grays it out and it then says something like “Form Submitted” up near the top, but it also still says “Not Filed” on the main page. There’s no transaction number or anything like that, and no email feedback. So I’m pretty sure I’m done with my Akron taxes, but not totally. Maybe I’ll log back in to check before the due date. Anyway, I got money back for this too, which I put fully toward next year. The amount I overpaid was exactly the amount that I had left to go forward from last year, because the amount payroll pays in is exactly correct.
I’m always glad to have taxes done for another year. This year wasn’t as stressful as it has been in the past, but there’s always a little bit, especially in anticipation as the 15th approaches.
I’ve been wanting to make my spreadsheet available in case it’s useful for someone else, with the obvious caveat that I’m not anywhere near a tax professional, it only applies to the situations I’ve dealt with, and I couldn’t promise that it would be correct for anybody but, and possibly including, me. But I’m not sure how I want to do it. I’d like to do it on Github, so that I can change it each year and have the changes reflected in one place, but spreadsheet files don’t diff well. So I’ll have to think about it.