Why we prepare your return in-house

Every spring, millions of households hand a folder of documents to a preparer who has never seen their financial plan. The preparer does careful work. The return is accurate. And almost nothing on it can be changed, because the decisions that shaped it were made the year before, by someone else.

We started Ostrand to close that gap. Here’s what it looks like in practice.

The return is the last page of the plan

By the time a return is prepared, the year is closed. The gain has been taken, the vest has happened, the conversion was or wasn’t done. A preparer can find deductions and avoid mistakes, but the big numbers are already fixed.

So we work the other way around. We build a tax projection in May and again in November, while there’s still time to act, and then prepare the return from the same numbers. When we file in the spring, nothing on the return is a surprise to you or to us.

What we see that a separate preparer can’t

Because the same team plans and files, the return becomes a source of information for next year:

• Withholding that doesn’t match reality. A large refund or a large balance due tells us the estimates were set from the wrong year.

• Income in the wrong place. Interest and non-qualified dividends in a taxable account often belong in an IRA.

• Deductions that just miss. Two years of charitable gifts bunched into one can clear the standard deduction when one year alone doesn’t.

• Carryforwards nobody is using. Capital losses and charitable carryforwards sometimes sit unused for years.

Each return comes with a short planning letter listing what we’ll do differently next year.

Two preparers, one review

Every return is prepared by one of our CPAs or Enrolled Agents and reviewed by a second before it’s filed. Your lead advisor sees the draft too, so the person who knows your plan confirms the return matches it.

If a notice arrives from the IRS or your state about a return we prepared, send it to us. We answer it.

When it doesn’t make sense

If your income is a single W-2 and your investments sit in a 401(k), good tax software will serve you well, and we’ll say so. Integration earns its keep when there are connected decisions to make: equity compensation, a business, a sale, a retirement, an inheritance.

What it costs

For full-relationship clients, the household’s federal and state returns are included in the annual fee. Planning and tax is a flat $6,000 a year with the return included. Tax-only clients start at $1,800 per return. The full schedule is on our fees page.