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Estimated-tax reminders that wait for your approval, and a preparer-independence check before a return files
Two changes here are about keeping people in control of what goes out. Estimated-tax reminders are useful precisely because they are timely, but a reminder that sends itself on a schedule you did not confirm is a reminder you cannot trust, so every reminder is now drafted for you and waits in your approval queue until you send it. And because a return should be signed off by someone other than whoever prepared it, the platform now checks the record of who did the prep work against who is named as preparer, and surfaces a mismatch for a reviewer rather than letting it pass unseen.
Estimated-tax reminders, drafted and waiting for you
A reminder is prepared ahead of the deadline and sends only once you approve it.
- →Ahead of each quarterly due date, the platform drafts one estimated-tax reminder per client with an active estimate, so the timing is handled for you.
- →Every draft lands in your approval queue. It reaches the client only after you approve it, and rejecting it discards it, so nothing goes out on its own.
- →Clients who have already paid or who do not take email reminders are skipped, so a reminder only reaches someone it is actually for.
A preparer-independence check on the way out the door
The record of who did the prep work is checked against who is named as preparer.
- →When a return is approved for filing or signed off in review, the platform checks whether the named preparer actually logged the preparation work.
- →If the named preparer logged none of it while someone else did, that mismatch is flagged for a reviewer and recorded, so the sign-off trail reflects who really did the work.
- →The check never blocks a legitimate filing. It adds a flag for a human to see, on top of the existing rule that a preparer cannot approve their own return.
Fixes & improvements
- •Connecting a firm's document-storage workspace now takes just the workspace domain and its app keys, and the connection says plainly when it still needs to be completed rather than showing a false connected state.