Client documents overview

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New (tax) year, new help!

Fixed Assets and UltraTax CS 2023 help is now on Help and Support. We're still moving articles, but you can find most content for the 2023 tax year there. Continue using the Help & How-To Center for tax years 2022 and older.

When you print a tax return, UltraTax CS automatically prints the following documents.

  • Transmittal letter
  • Filing instructions (based on the type of return you are printing or the type of data you have entered)
  • Invoice
  • Slipsheet

For more information, see Customizing the tax return print collation.

You can print and send documents that are provided with UltraTax CS without modifying them, proforma customized documents from last year's UltraTax CS, and/or use the Document Editing window to edit existing custom documents or create new ones. You can also edit the text of your client documents during Print Preview.  (Note that the printing of the following documents is determined by the user’s print collation setup. For example, the Government and Preparer default print collations have the following documents set to "as required," while the Client collation default print collation has the following documents set to "never.")

Customizing client documents

UltraTax CS enables you to customize the documents that you send to clients. If you created documents, added custom paragraphs, or customized existing documents in a prior-year version of UltraTax CS, you can proforma those documents so that you do not have to create or customize them again this year. For more information, see Proforma customized documents and custom paragraphs from the previous year and Customizing client documents.

After you create and/or proforma documents, there are many ways to customize them. For example, you can add any of the following items to documents that you will send to clients.

For specific information about editing client documents, see any of the following topics.

Choosing invoice pricing

Before you can print invoices, you need to decide if you want to charge for your services on a per-form, per-item basis (including source documents), or charge a flat rate for each client (in which case you need to enter an amount on each client's Screen Letter).

For information, see Setting up the invoice.

Setting print options and customizing print collations

UltraTax CS enables you to customize which documents print. You can make selections that apply to all items that print, to all items that print for clients of a specific entity, or for items that print for individual clients.

For information, see Printing overview and Print collations overview.

Printing transmittal letters and filing instructions

There are various ways to print transmittal letters and filing instructions. By default, UltraTax CS prints a transmittal letter for each client and separate filing instructions for each federal and state return. However, you can choose to combine the transmittal letter and filing instructions or you can choose to combine the federal and state filing instructions but keep the transmittal letter separate.

For information, see Printing transmittal letters and filing instructions on the same page and Printing federal and state filing instructions on the same page.

Sharing your customized documents

If your firm has multiple data locations, you can share customized documents and other files between these locations. For information, see Data locations overview and Sharing configurable files between firm data locations.

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