Taxes touch every part of the financial plan. Where they invest, how they save, when they take income, whether a Roth conversion makes sense. You can't make good recommendations without understanding the tax picture.

The tax module isn't for filing taxes. It's for tax planning. The question is: given everything we know about this client's income, deductions, and investments, what does their tax liability actually look like? And more importantly, what could we change to improve it?

Running scenarios is where the real value is. "What happens if we do a $50,000 Roth conversion this year?" Copy the scenario, change the number, and compare. "What if they exercise those stock options in January instead of December?" Same thing. The ability to model before recommending is what separates advice from guessing.

The best starting point is the client's actual tax return. Upload it, let Kerdora extract it, and build your baseline scenario straight from the filed numbers. Then every what-if you model is grounded in reality instead of estimates.

The MAGI thresholds in Analyze are especially useful. They show you exactly where the client sits relative to limits that affect IRA deductions, Roth contributions, the child tax credit, Medicare surcharges, and capital gains rates. Sometimes the best tax move is doing nothing because any additional income would push them over a threshold.

The Taxes module (under Planning) has four pages: Home is a dashboard for the client's current scenario, Returns is where you upload and extract tax return PDFs, Scenarios is where you build and edit each scenario, and Compare puts up to 4 scenarios side by side.

You can create a scenario three ways: manual input, copying an existing scenario, or building it directly from an extracted tax return. The calculator pulls what it can from the client's profile (state, filing status, wages, dependents) and you can override anything.

Inside a scenario, the Inputs view covers Configuration (year, filing status, family), Income (per-person wages and self-employment, household-level investment and retirement income), Adjustments to income, Deductions (standard or itemized), QBI, Tax Credits, and Payments (withholding, estimates, and safe harbor).

From those inputs, it calculates federal income tax, state tax, FICA, NIIT, and credits. The Analyze view is the results cockpit: total tax, effective and marginal rates, amount owed or refund, safe harbor status, MAGI and IRMAA thresholds, and a list of planning items. Plan Zone turns those into planning opportunities you can stack into a strategy. Report gives you a client-ready writeup, 1040 lays the scenario out in form view, and Reconciliation ties the scenario back to the filed return.

You can create multiple scenarios, rename them, and copy them. The primary scenario feeds into the client's overview.