Change Machine empowers you to collect information directly about your customer’s taxes. This enables them to better understand their financial security. This is where you can track customers' tax filing status, such as their tax filing method, or the amount of tax refund received or tax owed. You can even tie it to a monetary Savings Goals too as we show below.
Enter Tax information:
Click on the Taxes tab in the customer individual contact record.
After clicking “New,” fill out the fields in the resulting pop up window with information from the most recently filed taxes. This will include important information like: the tax year, the amount of tax refund or tax owed, tax filing method, type, the date a tax refund was saved, and filing date.
You can always come back and edit the information after saving. After filling out the required fields, simply click on “Edit.” You can also delete this entire window by clicking on the "Delete" button afterwards.
Let’s go through the required fields.
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Contact:
Defaults to the current customer.
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Tax Year:
Defaults to the previous tax year. Remember you can always click on a previous historical date by selecting that month and year.
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Refund Type:
Accounts for the type of taxes you are inputting for the customer. This can include Federal only, State only or Both.
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Tax Filing Method:
Documents how the taxes were prepared for your customer. This could be who did this and/or how. The options includes the following: Family/Friend, Free Tax Site, Paid Preparer, Prepared Myself, and Didn't File.
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Tax Refund Received:
Notes if there was any money from taxes the customer was given or if they owed any. The dropdown options consist of Yes, No, Owed Money and No, Didn’t File.
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How Much:
Accounts for the amount of refund received or money owed.
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Fees:
Accounts for the fees paid to a tax preparer. A non-required field.
The rest of the fields relates to the Savings Goal created in the Spending Plan section. You can associate a customer’s refund received directly with a goal to help for forward-thinking goal achievement.
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Savings Goal:
This is an active goal the customer would like to save a portion of the refund for. You can add a new goal here or search for existing ones.
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Amount Saved for Goal:
Is the monetary amount of the refund that was saved for a goal.
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Date Saved:
Is the date the refund was saved for a goal.
Track your customers’ tax history over time by regularly updating this as new information is available. Remember to just click “Edit” on the right hand side of this Tax data input for the fields to appear again.