Name: Intuit ProConnect: Tax Planning and Advisory
Uploaded: 2026-02-05T20:18:05.600Z
Duration: 1 h 2 min 8 s
Description: Intuit ProConnect: Tax Planning and Advisory

Transcript for "Intuit ProConnect: Tax Planning and Advisory": Hello, and thank you so much for joining me for this session Intuit ProConnect tax, tax planning and advisory. Glad that you could be here with us. We'll go through some quick introductions, some housekeeping, and talk about what we're going to be covering in this session. First, my name is Ross. Glad to be here with you today to talk about this. This particular solution into Tax Advisor and really advisory in general has been such a key solution, a key revenue driver, but also a key way for firms that I've worked with to really engage and provide something to their clients that more so than just compliance of getting the tax return prepared, of getting the return out the door, helping clients achieve more of a proactive approach, more of what their goals are looking for. And so it becomes a service or becomes a solution that really has a strong impact. Not to say that, you know, tax preparation, compliance work, it's definitely necessary and required, but this, solves for and really, delivers, like, different outcome than some of that compliance work. So glad that you could be here with us today as we talk about, Intuit Tax Advisor. And what will we talk about today? A short agenda just from the the look of it, but we'll actually be spending a lot of time inside of Intuit Tax Advisor today to learn a little bit more about it. We're gonna be starting with a quick overview, then we're going to jump into the program, and we'll be spending probably most of our time inside of, the the application itself today, which is good, so you're familiar with it. When you actually go in and start to do things on your own, you'll be more comfortable with it. And then we'll talk and kind of wrap things up with some of those strategies and custom strategies even that you could potentially utilize for your clients, especially if you have maybe some clients that are more specialized. There's a specific industry that they're they're in, that they're, needing more specific planning around. We'll talk about that before we wrap things up. Before we do that, though, some quick housekeeping. First and foremost, these are the best practices that we recommend. You'll see that those on screen there. I always say f five or refresh. If you ever run into any audio issues, video issues, technical glitches, you name it, refresh your browser, and that usually will kick things off so that you're not having those issues anymore. If things still persist, try a different browser, try a different device. That is my general recommendation. Also, we would greatly appreciate if you complete that survey that will come up at the very end of the session. That helps us do better as we continue to make these sessions, reinvent, revamp, and re craft the content that we're sharing with you to make, hopefully, your experience in these solutions better. There are going to be some polling questions asked throughout the session today. I'll give you plenty of time to answer them. I always try to make sure that we're not just rapid fire pulling at you. It'll pop up right in front on the main screen as well as on the side between the, chat tab and the docs tab. So if you see those in one of those places, answer them, that will not appear in the Poll tab when it's not active though. So if you say, Well, I don't see a Poll tab. There's no Poll active. That's what's happening. That's why you don't see it. The reason why you may wanna answer those polling questions first, it's to help with with engagement. Right? I'll talk through some of those questions, and there'll be a few that'll be relevant to the the content itself. But also, that is a requirement. You can see the requirements listed here because this session is eligible for one CPE credit. You can see those requirements. If you meet those requirements, we'll send you an email within two days with that certificate. If you don't see it, check your junk or your spam. And if you still don't see it after two days, send us an email at protax_training@Intuit.com. Let us know the title of this session, is Intuit Pro Connect Tax, tax planning and advisory, and the day as well so that our team behind the scenes can find those records more easily. A quick disclaimer too before we move too far ahead here. This session is one of those that, while I don't get into tax advice necessarily, there are going to be tax advisory topics or maybe even strategies that we'll see inside the program that while they're maybe applicable now, they may not be applicable in the future or things may change slightly. Our industry does that from time to time, changes things up. So, keep that in mind and that as things do change, we encourage you to stay on top of that information. So, if you're providing in your so, we have our first polling question. If you've been in other webinars, you've probably seen this polling question before. It is, what is your primary reason for attending this webinar? So, go ahead and take a few moments, about a minute, to answer this polling question, and then we'll move right along. Again, reminder, use the Q and A if you have questions for myself or my team behind the scenes. Use the chat if you have questions or comments for the general audience here today. And don't forget to check out that Docs tab where you can find the presentation material, the handouts. There are a few helpful links to embed it in those handouts, so hopefully you can use that to see that information afterwards. You can also use that to follow along if you like. Now when we get to this demonstration here in just a little bit, there won't be as much following along there because there's not necessarily slides that go through each element that we're gonna do in the program. So you wanna follow along on screen as I'm demonstrating it live rather than the presentation slides. But they're good to fall back on to refer back to after the session for sure. All right, let's go ahead and wrap this question up in three, two, and one. Well, then let's jump into a little bit of a what's the word I wanna use here? Prelude, not prequel, but our introductory remarks around tax planning and advisory. We're going to spend, like I said, some time in the program today so that you can actually get hands on in the software itself. But we also wanna set kind of the framework for why what the rationale is behind advisory what this particular platform can provide for you. So, let's start there then with this concept of the power of the platform. Intuit Tax Advisor is kind of uniquely positioned in that There isn't really another solution like it out there that integrates directly with your tax software and has AI insights built in directly. And I know AI can get thrown around and everything's AI nowadays, but it's taking the data from your client's return and being able to identify and connect, hey, this situation warrants looking at this type of strategy. And so it's pattern recognition, which we all can do. We all can say, oh, this client has X, Y, Z. That means they're a candidate for this strategy or this particular advice that we're gonna give them. But at scale, it's difficult for us when you have numerous clients to be able to pick those out with good accuracy that doesn't take a significant amount of time to comb through all that data and find it. That's where a lot of the power of this platform comes in, is being able to take all of your client's information, analyze it very quickly, and highlight not just here are the strategies we think will be applicable to these clients, but take it one step up. Here are the clients that could benefit from advisory in general, The ones that have the most potential to have tax savings, to reduce tax liability, and being able to spotlight those clients. Clients you may not have recognized on your own without that particular utility built in. And so it's gonna save time from just that aspect if you're already having to manually go through and identify clients. But on top of that, it's gonna let you prepare this actionable, deliverable service much more quickly. And that's not just subjective, that's we've asked. We've gone through and worked with firms that have done manual tax planning that prepare packages and explanations and strategies for their clients. And with Intuit Tax Advisor, you can see we're gonna be able to prepare returns on average in twenty two minutes, whereas firms that were doing this on their own, without Intuit Tax Advisor, we're taking hours. 2.3 is the average. And so you're having kind of that dual approach to saving time, which is creating that extra value, right? It's giving you that increased capacity to either offer more planning or to have this be still a significant element or component of your business as a revenue service and have something else included as well or regaining some of that work life balance, taking back some time. Maybe it's not all time that has to be service or providing more for your clients, but taking some time back for yourself as well. I always say that's your budget. When you get time back, a lot of times it's natural for industry and for especially, work workflow, topics to say, hey, now you can add on more services and you can do those. Sometimes just take the time back, right? Enjoy some time off or be able to not have to work as much over the course of a week, a month, a year. So that's available as well. Now, on top of that, many firms also have just said, hey, this is something that it's difficult. I can see the insights. Really kind of am able to get the general idea out to clients, but preparing something that can communicate that clearly and that's made easily, that doesn't take a lot of time to create, is also not an easy thing to do, and that's something else that gets created within Tube Tax Freezer. Have that report that's customized, yet still standardized and easy to understand and communicate the strategy, the benefits, the value, and the actions that they need to take. It also helps in quantifying the value of saying, Here's what your strategy is. Here's how much you can save. Here's what your return on investment is. And as I mentioned, because you're having a solution that can do these things quickly, can apply these strategies automatically, and can output or prepare this report, you're able to then, of course, scale these to more clients that could use your advisory services as well. Again, what you do with the time that you've gained is up to you, but definitely available, and I know that there are more individuals out there that can benefit from the general tax advice and tax advisory services. There is an overview here for Intuit Tax Advisor. This is great. It's in the presentation slides, which you can find in the docs tab. So, after this session, if you wanna, of course, this session will be available recorded, you can watch it again afterwards, but there is another, overview you'll find in the handouts if you'd like to click on that. That way, you can share it as well as this recording if you wanted, but to share that out as well or to have that in your back pocket should you want to review or perhaps just have it described in a slightly different way than what I've gone through today in the demonstration or shown it, and also a little bit of a use case and why into TaxAdviser has been official. What's the value in using it? Okay. Very quickly, we're not gonna hit on this too much longer, but a quick overview features and benefits. You can see these detailed here. I'm not gonna go through line by line and talk to it, but this is basically the jumping off point to say, Here's what's available. Here's the direct benefit. If you're not convinced, here's why you should be. But we're going to jump in and actually get into the software so we can see inside of Intuit Tax Advisor how to work through these different approaches. And while you're not necessarily you don't necessarily need to follow along with me today in building a plan out, I know we have other sessions kind of walk you through building your first plan. Feel free just to sit back, watch, observe, and ask questions. As we go through today, use the Q and A panel, to ask questions of me and myself behind the behind the scenes. You can also use the chat if you'd like to share best practices, ideas, or ask questions of your colleagues, your peers that are attending this session today. And in general, just hope that as we go through and see what this is like, that it proves beneficial to you and getting maybe not if it's not the initial experience, the initial view for you, it's a refresher so that you can jump back in as quickly as possible. Okay. We're ready for our next polling question. You can see it on screen here for about a minute, and it's Intuit Tax Advisors purchased separately from ProConnect Tax. True or false? Take about a minute to answer this question. It shouldn't take you a minute to answer the question. Easy true false here. And, of course, I'll even give you the answer. It's it is false. And two, Tax Advisors included with ProConnect Tax. There's no separate purchase, no credits you need to do. So take a moment, answer this question. I'll take a look at some of the questions that you've asked me or myself behind the scenes and get some of those answered for you. Alright. I think it is time to move on. Let's wrap this poll up here in three, two, and one. Alright. So now we're getting into that part of the session I've referred to a few times now. Let's get in and actually get hands on this and demonstrate what is available inside of Intuit Tax Advisor, how to do it, right, to get you, up and running, hopefully, as quickly as possible. We're going to do a few things in this demonstration, loosely organized. We may take some detours, sidetrack somewhere, but in general, we're gonna talk about the getting started process, some of the resources available on that welcome page, the tools or the ways that you can use the platform, the application to identify clients that could benefit from advisory services. We're gonna go into how to create an estimated tax plan as well as a full tax plan with strategies. And I'll be calling some things out again along the way. I don't think we'll get too sidetracked, hopefully not, but let's go ahead and jump in and look it into a tax advisor from the beginning. Let me switch things around here. There we go. Perfect. So now we are looking at Intuit Tax Advisor. Now I know sometimes things are a little harder to read when I'm sharing, so let me zoom in just a little bit here. There we go. Now we can see it a little bit more, a little bit more detail. So this is your welcome screen. This is essentially where you can get started in the environment to begin this planning process. Now, should mention too that for Lacerte, if you're using Lacerte with Intuit Tax Advisor, this is something where, before we get started here, really wanna make sure we sync our clients. Keep that in mind. For ProConnect Tax, your clients are gonna be here by default, so they'll be synced automatically. I like to mention that as well. I know there are some firms that use both. Again, most, but I'd say most firms don't use both, but there are some that do, so keep that in mind as far as knowing the different processes that are available or that are required for having your clients actually appear here. Now, this main welcome screen, I like to call this out and spend time in this section first because of all of these resources available to you. The Quick Help, you'll see on the right hand side where we have that demonstration I called reference to earlier, the Create a Full Tax Plan. But we have additional resources here as well, and some of these are more thought leadership, especially if you're not offering advisory services yet, how to start leading with tax advisory, how that becomes a core element of the services you provide, and how to position your practice and pricing that way, as well as some additional webinars and resources like the one like this one. But also, these built in videos here that talk about some key steps inside of Intuit Tax Advisor. We're gonna go through some of these today, but not all of them. And so that's why I reference this just because sometimes there are some specific things that you'd like to learn about for maybe certain clients. And we'll have step by step guides for a lot of those different elements there, those different pieces. So you can see those and find those resources available. The other place to call out here is the help menu located along that left panel. So you're able to find that as well, as well as the give us feedback. So that's another key element. We're really, in general, receptive to feedback, but for Intuit Tax Advisor, we want to know what strategies are working well for you. If you're creating customer strategies, what are they? Give us that feedback so we can craft into a tax advisor to meet your firm's needs, better in a way that really solves for what your clients are seeing. Because we know that if we have that for your your firm, we know there are other firms that also could need that help. You can also see any of the new, most recent releases or updates, and you're also you also are going to be able to see some additional elements here on that left navigation panel. Now, we're gonna be spending most of our time in this top menu bar as far as the welcome goes and looking at plans and looking at clients, but this is where we wanted to start things off. Now, the first thing you'll want to do, unless you already have a client that you know for sure you're gonna do planning or advisory around, but we wanna identify or at least find our clients. So by clicking on this client list, we're gonna see all of our clients again synced from Lacerte or synced from ProConnect Tax, and we have all of these columns where we can see, first of all, which client is it, who is this that we're talking about. We can see which forms or schedules are in their return, what balance due or refund is, their AGI, and some additional information about their tax return as well. But then when we get over to this far right hand side, notice that our column we have for likely strategies and potential tax savings are going to let us filter our clients by those that have the most potential tax savings or the most potential strategies that can be applied. And if I click on that strategy column, for example, I can see the types of strategies that it's suggesting or that it's found that could potentially be a fit for this client. I want to be clear about that. It does say likely strategies, as I say, for sure strategies. It's going to give you some strategies that based on what's going on in the client's return, we think that these strategies will fit, right? That doesn't mean they will necessarily, and so we, of course, you have the ability to turn them off or enable or disable as needed. We'll look at that in a moment. But this still gives you a good starting point or a reference for where or which clients could benefit the most. The potential savings is also a big one because while they may have less strategies, they may have more potential to reduce their tax liability as well. And so this is a wonderful way to see that information. And once you've identified a client, you can then either directly create a tax plan from this screen, or maybe you'd like to engage with them and you'd like to send them an email. We give you this template copy that you can copy and paste. Notice we have it for tax savings, estimated payments, or estimated payments with tax savings proposals. So combine the two above, and this is something that you can again copy and paste for this client into an email, to get essentially their engagement, their further interest in this service you're providing. Now, for those of you that have tax advisory as just part of your general engagement as well, you may not need this, but for those of you that are wanting to get in or start offering advisory as a more standardized service for your clients, that's going to allow you to engage with them and kind of using that as a little bit of a marketing tool that's customized for each client, but also can help gauge their interest in you providing that service. We're actually going to start, so we're not necessarily gonna create a tax plan for this client yet, but we're gonna actually navigate slightly just so you can see the other way to create plans. We're gonna navigate to our list of plans. Now this will show all of the plans that have already been created. And notice at the top, you can filter between the tax plans and the estimated tax plans. So you can jump between the two of them, and you can also search for clients. So if you're wanting find particular clients, you can use that to search. And notice also there's a filter here as well. So, if you're wanting to find clients that have certain years or certain projected years, you can do that as well. Especially helpful if you're just wanting to see, you know, the most recent year being projected. We're not worried about prior year plans necessarily, but you can apply those filters to see that information. You can also go back to see those potential clients directly from here. Just like in most of our applications, there's not one right way to do things. Offer different routes to get to the outcome. And so this is another way you can go to see those potential clients and the strategies and savings that could be available for them. But in this case, we're gonna create a new plan. And at this point, we get asked, do we wanna create a tax plan or an estimated tax plan? We're gonna start with an estimated tax payment plan first. And I'm gonna go ahead and find a client. Perfect. We'll use that base year. We'll find a return. Now notice this return was an e filed. That's okay. This is again just for me demonstrating this to you. If you were doing this, you maybe want to find a client that was e filed, but you don't necessarily have to. It's gonna take whatever information is in the return at that moment. The reason why it's highlighting that it was not e filed is because that may be an indication that the return isn't finalized, it's not actually complete. Again, you can still build any of these plans from incomplete returns, but you may have to do some additional input within Intuit Tax Advisor so that it is in the most accurate state for planning or doing these estimated plans that we're doing now. But we'll select that return. And then here I can name it really whatever I want. And I can choose again, 2025 is the year that's supported here. So we have that already preselected, and I can start planning and build out this estimated tax plan. Now we get brought to this first screen, which has a few updates or tips at the top that are always important to take a look at just for any new developing stories or new new developing, changes, input, updates, that type of thing. The first thing I wanna do just so that I can kind of get a better handle of this information is I'm gonna collapse all of these fields below. And just so that I have a little more real estate, I'm gonna close out of that tip there. And I can see down below just a overview of everything that's going on for this client. As I mentioned, all of this is coming through in the return. And remember, I'm I'm looking at this in kind of a zoomed in mode for all of you so you can see everything more clearly. If I'm working on this on my own, I may wanna have this zoomed out more so I can see things, more things that it's at one time. But again, for everyone to see, I'm I'm zoomed in a little closer than I normally would be working. All of this information, you can expand. Again, it was expanded by default, and you can make adjustments or changes to any of these fields. Now if you make an adjustment to these fields, you can just type it in, but the w two field in particular has a very nice calculator, whereas if you're not quite sure what the full year w two amount will be, you can use this calculator to estimate what the w two, what the final wages will be for your client at the end of the so this is a very, very useful tool to plan this out. This is available not just in this estimated tax payment section, but also in the full tax plan module or the tax planning side of things. But this is extremely useful. Also, if your client has some type of new activity that wasn't on their tax return, but does need to be part of this estimated tax payment plan, you can add that here. So maybe they've started their own business, and we're gonna have some Schedule C income, know, new pass through amounts coming through. Any of these different areas you can add into this plan to add that new activity so that you're calculating what will be or what will be the correct estimated, taxes for the next year with that new activity in place. And it may not be an entire new activity, right? Just like I mentioned, maybe there's their salary has gone up for the year. Maybe they're having more rental income. Any of these areas, any of these fields down below can be adjusted so that we're having new amounts created. So in other words, we have our twenty twenty four actual amounts coming from the return. We can change that baseline, what's changing for '25. We'll be able to see the difference in that difference column, but this is gonna allow us to make any of these adjustments here so that we can accurately create this estimated tax payment plan. Something else that's beneficial because there are quite a few zeros here too is some firms like to hide the zeros, but that's something where it's saying, hey, make sure you turn this auto calc off or, excuse me, on when we do that. Now we can hide our zeros and have just the fields now that have amounts. So we've we've essentially taken out all that white noise, and now we only have the activities that were actually relevant or coming from this client's return. So you can keep that in mind. I should spend just quickly here on that auto calc. If you have that auto calculate on, whenever you make a change and adjust that, it's gonna calculate everything automatically. If you're making a lot of changes, you may wanna turn this off to make all those inputs, all those changes, and then you can go in and calculate it. It will calculate when you navigate between these different tabs at the top, when you close the return. So it's not going to lose all of your information if you don't have that auto calculate on, but keep that in mind if you've got a lot of information to input. Notice too, we also do support states. You can have your primary state here as well. This will be true in the main plan or the full plan as well, but you have that information you can go to also. Once you've adjusted these amounts, so for example, just to put them out and let's say that, let's say we'll change this to 75 and you'll see that it'll calculate. So, this is where having that auto calculate turned on. If you've got to make several changes, you may not want the auto calc to be turned on. So, we'll go ahead and shift that off just for now. So, we're not having that. And I'm gonna make just a few changes throughout here. Now, I can make those adjustments directly here, but I can also do the view input details. So, I like to call this up because if you're familiar with this style of input, this may be easier to actually go through and change. We see all the information coming from their return. Again, in a format that's probably more familiar to you. And if we wanted to make those, any changes here for amounts, for the income statement in general, we can do so, and let me just make something here that's really more drastic a change, and we'll keep going through. Perfect. So we have some changes there. 25,000. Good. And I don't know if there's anything else we really need to change. I guess let's make something really, let's just add like a big number. There we go. Or a bigger number on that one. Perfect. Great. Notice my auto calculate is not on and we get that warning. You just say, hey, the amounts, you may wanna update that, to have those amounts. I'll just go ahead and turn auto calculate back on. We'll have that ready to go. Looks like we're ready to then now just see what our client report looks like. So we're gonna jump over to that report to see what these amounts are. So it's giving us this estimated tax payment plan. I don't know if we have anything for California. Let's see, yeah, do. We have California generated also there for this client. But this is a report now. You can share this with your client. This is something that just gives them the basic estimated plan based on their amounts that they had, right, inside of this inside of this program. Now it may not be what was in the return. It could be. Right? If it's just the return, generally, you can use the pre calculated amount in the program. But this allows for a little bit more finer control over those changes, over those amounts. You can preplan or get those estimated tax payment plans set up. Now, are some settings here as well that you should be aware of. I can click on report settings to see where you can customize this information, including your logo. So this Intuit logo is not the default logo there. You can put your own logo, right? You can add that same with any kind of color themes or information here. You can make those changes. You're also, I don't know if you have anything hidden. You're also able if you wanted to say hide maybe the state side, or if you wanted to put the state before, we should be able to drag and move that around. So you have some customization here as well in this report and how it prints out. When you're ready to share this with your client, you can download this report and then share it with them again as a PDF document for them to use. So that's the basic idea here. And that's really kind of the process maybe with training wheels, you'll get it loud or excused maybe the analogy of the basic concept of Intuit Tax Advisor. We're gonna take a client's return in, have the baseline amounts that we can adjust, and then from there, in this case, it built out an estimated tax plan. But what we'll see when we look at the full plan is the ability to adjust those with not just here's what your estimated payments will be, but here are some strategies you can use to reduce your tax liability. And so going back to my list of clients, if I click on create plan again, and now I'm gonna choose the full tax plan, we'll go through something very similar. I'm gonna choose my client. I'm gonna find their return, and I'm gonna build out their tax plan for the next year. Now just like we saw in that list of clients, I see that there's, you know, 24 possible strategies, some pretty significant savings here for this client. And it has that little caveat right here, right? It's just saying that this is just based on what the tax return has in it. The actual savings may vary, but this is still a good indicator that this client could benefit from this particular advice, these particular strategies. So let's take a look then at what a full plan looks like. And as we can see, it's pretty similar. Right? There's not a whole lot that's drastically different on the input from our estimated tax plan, except you'll notice a few additional tabs across the top. So now instead of just going from our pre strategy baseline directly to the plan or the report, we have some strategy section, a review section, and then the report section across the top. Additionally here, and I didn't call this out before, but additionally here, we can expand these things to get a little bit of a summary, to see their profile, what type of return are they married filing joint, what's their primary state of residence, Who are their dependents, Do we need to add more dependents to this section? And we can also see the summary information here in the summary section to see what their actual, what their projection are, to see this information at a glance, to see that summary details. Now, just like before, we can keep our auto calculate off. We can hide all the zeros. And what this will do again is if we turn that auto calculate on and hide all of our zeros, now we just have the key details that are coming through for this particular client. Just as before, if you need to make any changes to your baseline, your pre strategy baseline, you can either make changes directly here. Again, in the case of the w two, you click on the calculator if you need to put in, say it's partway through the year, you don't know what the full year w two will be, the full year wages, you can make those estimates here, put in this, the amounts to calculate what the full year will be or view that information on the input screen, on input details to see the input and, again, a more familiar view, a style that's more familiar, to both ProConnect and Lacerte, as far as the layout and the formatting is concerned. But you're able to input this information, make any changes as needed. We'll just, make a quick change there like that. Wonderful. And even, you know, I say changes, but even certain information around activities. So to change, for example, we're looking at some rental income, adjusting that from passive to non passive is another change or adjustment you made. So it really is. It's not just tweaking numbers. It's allowing you essentially to recreate or put in new information, new activities, new amounts, adjusting details around those activities so that it will kind of pre calculate the amounts. So you're not having to do those calculations yourself. In other words, just like I said there, having an activity go from passive to active isn't always as easy as saying, let's just update a number or a final amount. It may have repercussions or it may factor into multiple areas of the return where that's being calculated. And that's something to keep in mind as well, is we're not just tweaking the numbers and having the numbers come out new. We can make adjustments to specific activities in the return that will impact every other area of the return that's being calculated. Just like when you prepare a return, when you make a change or an adjustment to whatever form schedule that you're entering, it may not just impact and oftentimes it doesn't just impact that schedule. It has the wider reaching implications to calculations throughout the return, including state calculations. That's true here as well. And so it's smart enough to say if you make a change here, we know it's gonna impact X, Y, Z at the same time. Whereas sometimes in planning, it really doesn't connect those dots as well as what Intuit tax advisor does. But that's our first stop just like we've done here. Now I can press F9 as my message is alerting me to. I can turn auto calculate back on, but it's also gonna save that information as I jump to my next tab and you'll see that recalculate. And the next tab is our strategy tab. And this is where we apply some strategies. We decide what's gonna work well for clients. It's gonna have some strategies preselected. I also wanna mention that Intuit Assist is really called out here pretty big and bold. Intuit Assist is an, an AI assistant that will help you, answer some questions or apply some strategies for clients. So as you can see some examples here of prompts you could use for it, like maximize my client's business deduction, convert from schedule C to S corp, show me top three retirement strategies. So you can chat now and we'll just actually go ahead and let's try that. Show me top three retirement strategies. We'll just give it a try. Yep. I'm zoomed in a bit too much. There we go. Oh, good. It actually prompts me here in a bubble. I can just click on. No. Maybe I can't just click on them. Well, let's try to ask the question. There we go. I wonder if my environment doesn't have full access to Intuit Assist, but that's that's a shame because that's really helpful to be able to ask questions. But again, sometimes my sandbox, my environments don't have all the full capabilities, unfortunately, but this is something that you can use. Again, it's not designed or is fully built out as some of the other Gen AI tools you may be familiar with out there in the wild. It's really laser focused again on these specific tasks around strategies and strategies that are applicable to clients. It's not going to have the full impact. If you're trying to do like tax research questions, it's not built for that yet. It's really just designed to identify for this client some of those potential strategies and savings. So a useful tool, sorry that it wasn't enabled for my account, but it will be for yours. You'll have the option to do that. Now, you may not need to do that too often though, because again, it's already identified some of these strategies for you. So as much as that tool is useful to say, is there any other strategies that may fit? We've already identified strategies that you can use. And so by looking at, some of these strategies, for example, we can see the ones we want and just adding those to the return will then generate them and show them here. Now there's no savings there. We can continue through though. And you don't have to add all of these strategies. It may be the case that some of these don't quite work, and that's just fine if that's the case. So if we're not quite, convinced with that as a strategy, dismissing it will work. There's no need here to apply any of these strategies really, but this is all going to help essentially calculate what are the savings, what can be done. So adding a few of these here will show us some of these savings, some of these insights for the client. And I can continue to scroll down. You can see there's several other strategies here that could be used. But then we get to the bottom and we notice something that isn't necessarily strategy, like the ones up top, but it's called an analysis or an insight. So these are these are insights around things like in this case, QBI. And it's explaining that we can add this, analysis to the return to help yourself and hopefully your client also understand that calculation better. So, we can see the details here. We can see our phased in reduction and then the federal QBI worksheet to see those high level details that help with that analysis around, in this case, QBI deduction. And we've got a few strategies listed out here. We haven't calculated it, so we'll go ahead and and calculate that now that we've added these strategies. And what we'll look at next is it's nice to have these strategies added again. These are the ones that were found, that were self identified. Notice too that you can toggle these on and off. There's the green slider. So if you decide, even though you've added them, you maybe not don't include them in the calculation or don't include them in the final report. We can simply shift those off to no longer be included here. But I wanted to call out the fact that one, all the strategies that are suggested, you can search through and you can also click on our entire library of strategies to find all strategies that are available to you. And again, searching through is helpful, but you can also add custom strategies here. So if you're wanting to add your own strategy with name, description, what it's related to, a federal or state, and including the impact of those strategies as well, how, what that impact, what rates it will impact and what that out of pocket formula is for spending and what it will take to implement the strategy. We won't go into too much detail around customer strategies, but I like to call out that it is here. You can click on add a custom strategy And once you've created that custom strategy, it can be applied to any client that it fits to. So you can essentially create that and reuse it. And that'll let you scale that strategy across any client that it may be applicable to just like you can with any of our pre created or predefined strategies that are built out in our library or that are being assigned as an input. Also wanted to call out that if you wanted to find strategies that relate to certain or specific areas, you can hide strategies or see strategies just for those areas as well. So, it lets you further filter out, refine what type of strategies we're seeing here, again, as well as the federal and the state. Another element here that I didn't talk about is if I click on the strategy name, I'm now going to get information for this strategy. So, the about this strategy, we can see this is going to print in the client reports. This is what your client will see around details for this strategy. But it also includes internal information for you when you're applying this or wanting to understand why this strategy is applicable or how it's being used. We give you those insights that'll help you make any determinations you may need to make around this strategy and its relevancy for this client, as well as seeing any other additional research considerations here. We have hyperlinks to some of the documents and resources to find out more information around it. You can see the formula, how this is being calculated, how the change in the strategy is being calculated for your clients. And then finally, in client materials, this is information that's going to print for the client report. So when your client sees this and for example, something like business use of home, when they see this, they're going to be given resources around that, some links to look at as well as what they need to do. So what are the action steps needed? We'll see that in just a moment when we look at the report, but all of this is built in here. Again, we got here by clicking on the name of the strategy. It doesn't have to be just in our left navigation. It could be a strategy that you've applied this return. That's going to let us see the details around this strategy, that you can use. One, in having client communication now before you deliver it, but two, in helping you and your firm and anyone working on these strategies, these plans for your clients to better understand them and to dig in deeper on the research side if you need to. Now there's nothing that's preventing you from coming back here and adding more. So moving on is not saying we're done, we're wrapped up, we don't need to add any more strategies. Just like when you're preparing the return, you can always go and see the output before you're necessarily done with the input. So just because we're moving on from this screen, doesn't mean that we can't come back here or could come back here if we needed to. But our next stop is review plan. This is going to show us a bird's eye view of all the different things that are changing within the plan based on what we've added. So that includes, right, we have changes to our baseline. And now we have changes that are coming as a result of any strategies we've added. Now we can see that summary information here. Just like before, if we turn our auto calculate on, we can hide our zeros, we can filter by certain strategies that have been applied, We can collapse all of these fields just to see the high level amounts as well. And if we want, we can also print this page as a PDF. Useful for clients, but also useful internally. If you're wanting to share this, these insights, these high level changes, just one additional document or item that can be used for either yourself or your clients, but that can be printed off from here as well. And we also have, again, the states can be included here too. Again, your primary state is also available as an option here. Once we're satisfied with this review process, now we can go to the client report itself. And the client report's broken up into two sections, really. The proposal, which is what we're seeing now, and the tax plan, which is more of the full tax plan. The way that I've described this in the past is that the proposal is maybe something we can share with clients as an incentive. Notice we have the estimated tax payment plan here as well. For federal and state, we have some estimated savings. And it will, if you have any amounts being invested that you'll have savings, what is your ROI? In this case, the strategies we've picked, looks like it'll save them a little over $15,000 but it doesn't require any investment. So the ROI is, you know, it's one of those situations where mathematically there's what's the ROI on zero. We get into that pick, pick whatever number you want, infinity. But anyway, you're basically having a $15,000 savings for a $0 investment. So there you go. That's the savings you have, but that will calculate if it does require them to have, you know, out of pocket investment out of pocket towards any of these strategies. It will let them know that, you know, spend X dollars, save this many dollars. And it gives them a way to review potentially what you can provide them without getting the full details yet. So for some firms, they like this as a review. This may be something that's sent out as a pre work. So before you, this may be based on what you know right now, and then maybe through meeting with your client, getting further information, what's changing next year, then they can, you can provide more of that full tax plan. And the tax plan is going to give some of the same details as the proposal as far as being able to see what's in the plan, but this includes more of the actionable items and what your client should do. So it's going to give them here the next steps. It also starts with a disclaimer, which is pretty critical in any advisory services. It gives them that summary information, but then it's also going to take all of their strategies, lay them out for them and give them details around that strategies. This is where we see those insights, those instructions for your clients, but then the actionable items. What do they need to do next? What needs to happen here for any of your strategies that you have added? This is where it becomes extremely beneficial because you're not just saying, Oh yeah, if you do this, you can save this amount of money. That's great to know, but I also need you to do certain things so that we can actually achieve these strategies. That's what this how to get started, how this section is laid out. Now, all this is generated by default. That doesn't mean you have to keep with what has been generated by default. We're going to allow you to edit or customize this just like we saw in the estimated plan, where you can edit this content. So maybe you want to call this something different. Maybe you're wanting to shorten things out, right? Maybe a little more personalized on that, or maybe you wanna get something more specific. Maybe it's not just a visual thing or a preference. Maybe you're wanting to include more specific instructions or change the wording. So, you can edit these fields to have it say what you need it to say. Maybe include an additional step. Some more instructions that you wanna have included in many of these strategies. Maybe you're wanting to adjust these insights that are presented on the screen. All of that is available to you if you wanna make any of those adjustments, any of those tweaks to this report. And just like we saw in the estimated plan, if you wanna reorder any of these pages, you can click to drag so that you change where these pages appear and you can customize just like before your logo or choose to include it or not, as well as the colors of the, the formatting that you want. This can be customized too. So if you have a particular color that your firm, is associated with, your branding guidelines, if you have those, you can adjust it to be color. We do have some of the default themes you can pick from, but notice you can have really a large number of custom themes to be used as well. And this just helps it get more personalized, more customized to you and your firm and for your client as well. No, let's save it. I like the blue color. We'll keep it blue. From here, after we have our proposal or tax plan again, just like we saw, you can then download this client report and share it with your client as needed. That may be through something like Intuit Link, it could be email or another portal. I generally recommend against just emailing things. You can do it. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, But I recommend using this client portal, something like Intuit Link would be great or your own way to share documents or even just printing out that PDF if you're meeting with your client, if you're meeting them face to face and delivering that. You know, traditionally old school, hand paper, that's fine too. The final piece before we jump out of here, just wanted to note that there are notes. So if you're wanting to add notes to this, maybe as you're having conversations with your client, as more than one person is working within this tax plan for the client, you may want to include different things, different notes. These will be timestamped. They'll have a title. Notice you can insert images, insert files directly here, also format this into a list, a checklist if you want, and have kind of some of those word editing options as well. You can also bookmark any notes. So, if you want to have certain notes be towards the top, you can do that as well. So, that helps keep some information side by side if you're working on this and want to have those notes available for yourself. That's always helpful, but also especially for anyone else that's working in this return as well. There we go. I think that's a good starting point. Again, not necessarily beginning to end comprehensive. There's a lot to look at as far as, you know, some of these custom strategies, how to look at certain things, like if you wanna see more details on projecting for next year's w two income converting to an S excuse me, a Schedule C to an S Corp basis tracking, Biz Income, all of those resources. There's a lot more to be unlocked here inside of Intuit Tax Advisor, but that hopefully gives you at least the baseline understanding of whether you're creating an estimated plan or a full plan. You have your baseline amount that's brought over from a return. You can make any tweaks, adjustments, add activities, remove activities from that baseline. And then for the full plan, can decide which strategies are applicable, add your own, even the ones that maybe weren't suggested, and then see that report to further customize it, edit it and prepare that for your client. That will give them details on what their ROI is, what their savings are, as well as what they need to do to accomplish it with those actionable steps, with those what's next, those details to actually take your advice, your advisory guidance, and put it into practice. Wonderful. Okay, we have our next poll for you. I know it's been a while, and this, we'll have one more poll after this too. And it's, do you communicate tax savings by strategy to planning clients? So in other words, do you break it down? Do you itemize this saves this, this saves this, or you just communicate it all in a lump sum? And if you don't communicate at all, if you don't have any planning clients, you can pretty confidently say no to this question. This is just a quick guide. And it's really just to remind you to say, if you help to break it down by those different strategies, by those different pieces, it helps reinforce the idea in your client's mind that each of these are kind of a separate piece. It's not something all in one. It's not one single action that you can take to save this or reduce your liability. And it helps create again, not just the impression of value, but the actual concrete here is the value, here is what is happening at each point along the path of your journey of this advisory experience that I'm providing for you, here's what the outcome will be at each step along the way. Wonderful, we're gonna wrap this poll up in about five seconds. So if you haven't answered, I know you may have stepped away, maybe we're watching from a distance when we were inside the software. So take a moment to come back. Now I've included this in the presentation slides as well. We're not gonna, I'm not gonna go over each of these strategies exactly to go kind of beginning to end. But this is where you can see kind of a good overview of strategies. There's also a in our knowledge base, we have a list of all of our strategies in our library that you can view. Oh, I guess just kind of the main pieces here. We can see that listed out on this screen. In fact, I think that instead of going through all of those, let's talk about quickly the custom strategies. I showed this inside in our demonstration. This is where we looked at. At the bottom of our strategies, have that option to add custom strategies. And these will be added. You don't have to add it every time you want to apply that strategy for your client, but this is going to allow you that flexibility. If there's some specific scenario that are for your clients that maybe aren't generally applicable to a larger number, it may not be in our library as a strategy that can be applied, but you can add your own. Again, once you've created it, you can apply it to any of your clients that you have, that you need, and let you really jump into more of that specialized advice, especially, and if it is a subset of clients, maybe it's your area of expertise, you can then scale those services more broadly. Some of those custom strategies that we have listed here, you can see some examples. Again, I will say that if we have a list of custom strategies, there's a very good chance to that, well, I won't make any promises or I can't make any promises. There's also a good chance that, you know, we see these, these are probably some of the more common custom strategies. Those become the strategies we add to our library. We also going back to what I said before, encourage you to share with us that feedback, those pieces that you're utilizing that makes sense to add just by default. So please share that feedback. Again, I mentioned that inside the return, inside the program where you could see that information. Wonderful. So we have our last polling question here as we're wrapping things up at time. If you would like have that sales demonstration or consultation, the more personalized around your firm, please let us know. Answer yes here. I'll leave this point up just briefly. We don't have to spend a lot of time in this poll. But again, if you have more questions, would like to know more about implementation, especially as it relates to your tax software, please let us know here and we'll reach out. If you have other questions, you can always find information and support for Intuit Tax Advisor as well as your tax software. In our support page within our community, you can ask amongst your peers. And we also have our education center and tax pro center. If you'd like to learn more, especially around strategies, but even conceptually around advisory and how maybe your business can lead with advisory or how you can shift into offering more advisory services if you aren't today. With that being said, that's it. We are a smidge overtime. So thank you so much for being here with me today. Wish you all the best in this tax season and I guess all the tax seasons to come too. But until next time. Bye for now.