Tax Planner

General Information

The Lacerte Tax Planner allows you to provide valuable tax planning services to your clients throughout the year. Because it seamlessly integrates with the Lacerte Tax Program, the process of transferring your clients' data is simple and quick. Along with extensive tax calculation capabilities and Lacerte's ease of use, the Tax Planner program offers you the ability to:

Set Up & Modify Plan Types -You can transfer tax clients from the tax program or create new plans and then select from four different types: Year/Case Analysis, MFS/MFJ Comparison, Difference Analysis, and Adjustment Analysis.

Enter Data & Calculate Adjustments - You can enter data from a macro or micro approach, copy data between cases and years, and adjust data by amounts or percentages. The Tax Planner uses real-time calculations and also allows you to incorporate inflation adjustments. The generic state planner allows you to make adjustments from the Federal AGI for any of the state plans being prepared, and complete state planning is available for Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Oregon. The Tax Planner also includes pre-filled templates for all generic states, and uses the appropriate state tax rate to calculate the state's tax liability.

Generate Reports - Not only can you create custom templates and select the print layout, but you can also produce professional reports that contain user-defined documents such as custom letters and graphs.

To complete the exercises in this tutorial you must have a licensed version of the Tax Planner program installed.

Navigating in Tax Planner

It is important to understand that Tax Planner is a simple system of layered worksheets. The worksheets are layered in a hierarchical fashion: the higher level worksheets contain summary amounts, and the underlying worksheets contain more specific, itemized amounts. The following illustrates how to navigate through the worksheets using your mouse or shortcut keystrokes.

There are four things you need to know to successfully navigate in Tax Planner:

1. The Tabs represent the highest level worksheets, which are the main input sections.
   
2. The Worksheet list shows all available worksheets for the selected tab, or main section.

   

3. The drill-down method allows you to:
• Get to the lower worksheet levels by double-clicking an amount with an underlying worksheet. These cells are indicated with a .
• Add a custom worksheet by double-clicking an amount at the lowest worksheet level. These cells are indicated with a .
4. The Back button goes back to the worksheets you've previously accessed in your current Tax Planning session.
   

The following is a list of graphic indicators that appear on the worksheets and what each one indicates:

Graphic:	Indicates:
	Supporting worksheet exists below the amount
	You can create a custom worksheet for the amount
	Locked column, no entries allowed
	Override amount, diagnostic exists for the amount
	Information is missing or is inconsistent with your current settings, but does not affect the program's calculations
	Incompatible information exists that will cause incorrect calculations, and must be corrected
	Red flag indicates that a field note exists for the amount

Print Shortcut Keys

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