The Tax Professional’s Guide to a Paperless Tax Workflow

Using Scanned Tax Documents to Prepare Returns: Setting up Adobe Acrobat for Tax Preparation

Moving to a paperless tax workflow isn’t an exercise in change for the sake of change—it’s a matter of efficiency.  When it comes down to it, there’s no reason you can’t work with digital tax workpapers the same way you would with paper ones.  Training your staff to use the software tools that make it easy to work with electronic documents will ultimately make the difference in time savings during tax season.

One of the most basic software tools available to your firm is PDF viewing and editing programs, like Adobe® Acrobat®.  I’m sure you’re familiar with PDF viewing software, like Adobe’s free Reader® program, but it’s the Acrobat Standard and Pro products that will allow you to leverage the types of functionalities you need to make tick marks, comments, and annotations on the electronic workpapers. (To learn exactly which product does what, see this detailed list of Adobe Reader vs. Acrobat capabilities)

We’ll start with a very basic overview of the Acrobat User Interface. The Acrobat User Interface consists of three main areas—the Document Area, the Navigation Panels and the Toolbars.  

Navigation Panels: Navigation Panels allow you to quickly find any bookmark, comment or page in a set of PDF source documents. There are three Navigation Panels that are frequently used by tax professionals—Pages, Bookmarks and Comments. Simply click on the icon for the desired panel or use the View menu to access a Navigation Panel.

The Pages Panel shows the scanned images in the order that the pages were scanned. This panel can be used to add or combine separately scanned pages to a document—which is useful for merging additional tax documents that arrive late, after the return has already been started.  Just click and drag the pages to rearrange the order.

The Bookmarks Panel makes it easy to navigate through the document with bookmarks, which are virtual links to pages within the document.  The easiest way to bookmark electronic source documents is to use a tax document automation solution, which will automatically bookmark your clients’ documents in a consistent order that matches the tax preparation process, with the document issuer’s name on each bookmark (an example of a bookmark label is: “1099 INT # 1  COUNTRYWIDE HOME LOANS”). You can also manually bookmark pages in Acrobat Standard or Pro (keyboard shortcut Ctrl+B).  

Bookmarking tax documents is a key time-saving capability that is unlocked by going paperless.  The bookmarks let you quickly jump to specific documents within the PDF, without having to wade through tens—or even hundreds—of documents to find the tax data you’re looking for.

Like the pages panel, you can click and drag bookmarks to rearrange the order.  One thing to note is that the order of the bookmarks may not match the order of the actual pages in the document, so moving a bookmark will not automatically change the order of the pages.

The Comments Panel lets you easily find and review any tick mark or annotation in a set of PDF source documents. This feature is primarily used during the review process. Click on any comment in the comments panel to jump to that annotation in the document.  Note how each comment includes the user name of the person who inserted the tick mark or annotation. This makes it easy to review comments of specific preparers. The comments panel also provides the ability to sort comments by different criteria, such as author, date, and tick mark color.

Before you use the Comments Panel, you’ll have to familiarize yourself with Toolbars that allow you to create comments and annotations.  To customize the toolbar, select View in the main menu, then select Toolbars to choose and select which tools to use. You can customize the toolbar for your own needs, but some of the most frequently used toolbars for tax professionals include:

1. Comment & Markup: Tools for adding tick marks and annotations
2. File: Open, save and print files
3. Find: Search a PDF document
4. Page Display: Change document display settings
5. Page Navigation: Quickly move to any page
6. Select & Zoom: Easily zoom in and zoom out on any page
7. Tasks: Create and combine PDF files
8. Typewriter: Add annotation by typing text anywhere in the document.

So now you should have a good idea of how to find the primary functionalities you will be using in Adobe Standard and Pro.  We’ll take a deeper look at how to create tick marks and use comments in future blog posts, but until then you can download our free white paper, Five Essential Techniques for Preparing Returns Using Scanned Tax Documents, to learn more about using Adobe to prepare and review tax returns.