How to transfer a customized letter template from another PC or from a prior year version. Also tax organizer printing tips with 2-sided printing.

[Bos]

I purchased a new PC and lost my customized template from the previous year. I was able to copy it from another PC that had the template. If you are not using customized templates you probably should look into it. I realize this is not a question but I wanted to share this information. 

The letter templates are stored as Rich Text Files, or RTF files. You can copy the RTF files from the previous year or even from that version on  another PC. For example, the 2024 template for the cover letter on the organizer can be found on my PC at : C:\ProWin24\common\ogmltr.RTF

If you look in C:\ProWin24\common\ (your primary may be a different letter than "C") you can find all the templates by looking for the .RTF files. In Windows file explorer, if you have file preview enabled, you can click on each file to read the contents.

In PreSeries you can also edit the letters to add page breaks and then additional additional letters and information. I edited my organizer letter to contain my own instructions for completing and returning the organizer, the engagement letter, and the privacy policy. 

If you want to copy the engagement letter into the cover letter template, you can edit the engagement letter template, select and copy the whole thing, close it and then open the cover letter template and paste it in after a inserting a page break. This saves me a lot effort when preparing the organizers for mailing to my clients.

I also add blank pages after 1-page documents to facilitate double-sided printing. Then I print my organizers all to PDF, combine all the PDF's into 1 new PDF file, insert pages as needed to make sure the next client in the file doesn't start printing on the back page of the previous client's organizer, and then I send the PDF containing all of my client organizers to the printer.

Adding the necessary blank pages is easy in Adobe Acrobat because when you combine the organizers into 1 PDF it creates a table of contents. Click on each client in the table of contents and make sure the first page of their organizer is odd-numbered.

I hope you find this helpful.

I suppose to make this into a question I'll ask this: Does anybody have a better method for what I described?

[dascpa]

While we all despise P.S. letter editor, I have custom 1040 letters that I use for every client.  I prepare my final version, copy and paste it to a Word file that I save in a Documents folder.  The following year I copy and past that saved file into the new P.S. letter file, replacing what P.S. has prewritten. Once saved in P.S. as the master you don't need to worry about Common File folder and Rich Text Files.

[Accountant-Man]

I have only ever copied the end of year Common folder (say 2023) to the 2024 Common folder and they all update.

[Ephesians3-14]

That's exactly what I do as well - just copy the prior year file over.