Personal tax preparation for Franklin households

Personal tax preparation here means your federal return, prepared and reviewed by a CPA-led team, with planning attached to it. The firm puts it this way: “Every return we file includes proactive tax planning designed to minimize your liability and align with your broader financial goals.” So the work doesn’t stop at the signature line.

It starts with onboarding, where we learn what you file today and what’s changing in your household. You upload W-2s, 1099s and the rest through the client portal at haventaxadvisory.clientportal.com instead of mailing paper or attaching it to email. From there we prepare the return, check it against the current deductions and phaseouts, and walk you through the result.

After filing, the conversation turns forward. Clients hear from us through a set meeting cadence and timely communications, so a change in income, a new dependent or a large purchase gets discussed before the year closes rather than after it. If you also run a business, its return is handled on our business tax preparation page, and the forward-looking work is described under tax planning.

For tax year 2026 the standard deduction is $16,100 for single filers and married couples filing separately, $32,200 for married couples filing jointly, and $24,150 for heads of household. Those figures come from IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-32, announced on October 9, 2025.

Whether to take it or itemize comes down to one comparison: your itemized total against these amounts. State and local tax is often the item that decides it. For 2025 returns the SALT deduction is capped at $40,000, or $20,000 for married filing separately, and the cap phases down for modified AGI above $500,000 until it reaches a $10,000 floor. The IRS has not yet posted the 2026 SALT figure, so we run that comparison again once it does.

Mortgage interest, charitable gifts and property tax all feed the same test. We add them up from your documents rather than guessing, then pick whichever route leaves you with the lower bill. If the answer is close, that is a planning point for next year, not only a line on this one.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025 as Public Law 119-21, created four deductions that run for tax years 2025 through 2028. Each one has an income limit, so the amount you can claim depends on your modified AGI.

• Tips: up to $25,000, phasing out above $150,000 of modified AGI, or $300,000 on a joint return.
• Overtime: up to $12,500, or $25,000 for a joint return, with the same phaseout points as tips.
• Seniors 65 and older: $6,000 for each qualifying person, phasing out above $75,000, or $150,000 joint.
• Car loan interest: up to $10,000, phasing out above $100,000, or $200,000 joint.

These sit on top of the standard deduction, which is why they reach households that never itemize. They also end after 2028 unless Congress extends them, so a deduction you count on now belongs in a longer conversation about the years after it expires. We apply them where your paperwork supports them, using the figures in IRS Fact Sheet 2025-03.

The IRS default is three years from filing, but several situations stretch that period. Its published guidance sets out the longer cases:

• Four years for employment tax records, if you have household or business employees.
• Six years if income you left off a return was more than 25% of the gross income you reported.
• Seven years if you claimed a loss from worthless securities or a bad-debt deduction.
• Indefinitely if no return was filed, or if a return was fraudulent.

In practice, keep the return itself along with the documents behind each number on it: wage statements, brokerage forms, receipts for deductions and the closing papers on a home. A digital copy counts if it is complete and readable. Copies you have already sent us through the client portal don’t replace your own set, so hold on to the originals for at least the period that applies to you.