Nitro PDF Offers Tips to Simplify Taxes

More people than ever before are filing their taxes electronically. Over the course of 2010, nearly 100 million Americans – 70% of the taxpaying population – used IRS e-file to lodge their tax return.

While the adoption IRS e-file continues to grow, most people still supplement their electronic submission with hardcopy documents such as W-2s, pay-stubs, and receipts – information that is typically both received and archived in many different formats, with at least one being physical paper.

Nitro PDF Software provided us with four easy-to-follow tips to help streamline your tax filing and leverage the efficiencies of digital documents in the 2011 tax season.

1. Future Proof Your Taxes – Tracking down copies of last year's tax statements or this year's lost W-2 can be frustrating, and time-consuming. Avoid the inevitable hours spent searching and create an archive of both physical and digital financial records that can be easily searched and opened by anyone using PDF/A – the digital archival standard.

Portable Document Format is lightweight, secure, and universally accepted – it can be opened by anyone from your accountant to the IRS. Convert almost any Windows file format to PDF – from spreadsheets to statements – and use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on scanned paper to create convenient, searchable PDF files that can be accessed for years to come.

So go ahead, future proof your taxes and create PDF/A compliant archives from over 300 different file formats using Nitro PDF Professional (free 14 day trial).

2. Fill and Save Tax forms - Just about any government form can be downloaded as a PDF file, and businesses both big and small often utilize forms to gather information from their clients. Active PDF forms are designed to be filled easily and quickly, with many allowing you to submit the completed file with the click of a button.

You can avoid starting to fill out forms from scratch every time you make a mistake by scanning them to PDF and completing them electronically. Type text anywhere on the page, sign them digitally (if required) and even add them to your PDF/A archive for record-keeping. Sitting on a stack of paper documentation you've been avoiding? Scan them as PDF files and free yourself from clutter today.

Using the free Nitro PDF Reader you can fill in any PDF forms – print them, save them, export their data, and submit them to a web or email destination.

3. Safeguard Your Taxes - Financial information should always be considered highly sensitive and treated accordingly. Whether you need to email a document or use a web-based submission service, security controls form a powerful toolset to protect your information, and should always be on your checklist when preparing your taxes.

Safeguard your private financial data using military-grade 256-bit AES encryption to secure your PDF files with password protection and digital certificates, and specify usage permissions to manage how people interact with your documents and prevent individual activity such as copying, editing, or printing.

Nitro PDF Professional covers you for encrypting and decrypting tax documents, certifying and signing, managing the public keys of your trusted contacts, and password-protecting PDF files to control access and usage. The free Nitro PDF Reader allows you to add basic password security to PDF files you create.

4. Combine and Streamline Your Tax Documentation – Many people today receive a pay stub (or pay slip) in PDF format. Regardless of whether you're paid weekly or monthly, that's one serious paper trail, and an organizational nightmare come tax time. Simply combine all the pay stubs into one 'master' PDF file to avoid hours wasted by you or your accountant trying to work with 52 individual files.

Combining files in Nitro PDF Professional couldn't be easier, and the resultant PDF comprising all your pay-stubs allows you and your accountant to easily scroll through the entire financial year within the one PDF document – no more piles of invoices, receipts, bank statements, or financial reports.

Visit www.nitropdf.com for more information on Nitro PDF software solutions.