Frequently Asked Questions

Picnic’s service offerings include Personal Tax Filing, Small Business Tax Filing, Tax Planning and Advice, Self-Employed Taxes and Equity Compensation Management. It’s highly likely that your situation falls into one of these categories but if you’re confused at all, feel free to contact us and we’re happy to talk you through what service might be best for you.
Picnic can handle anything from a simple W-2 with the standard deduction to very complicated tax situations. Whether you earn income in multiple states, are self-employed, have international tax items or are someone with lots of different investments, rest assured we have an accountant who can handle your situation. Our goal is to make things easy for you no matter how complicated your tax situation is.
First, you’ll tell us a little bit about your background and your unique tax situation. Based on that information, we’ll give you a price quote and assuming you want to proceed, we’ll select an accountant from our network that is the perfect fit for your needs. After we make the introduction, you’ll work with your accountant directly on our platform. If you’d like to set up a phone or Zoom call with your accountant, that’s absolutely fine as well and that can be set up directly in your Picnic dashboard.

Pricing depends on the service offering selected with Personal Tax Filings starting around $225, Small Business Tax Filings starting around $750 and Tax Planning and Advice starting around $300. Payment is collected when the job is initiated but is not released to your accountant until the work is completed to your satisfaction.

We have an extensive screening process that we require our accountants to pass before they can work on Picnic. We review the backgrounds of all our tax pros including résumé reviews and third party verification services. Prospective accountants must also pass our test to determine their skill level as well as provide a copy of a government-issued ID as well as proof of a PTIN license (the tax license that the IRS requires for an individual to prepare taxes).
Absolutely. Once you have signed off on the draft of your return, your accountant will file it directly with the IRS. All of our accountants are licensed to file taxes electronically as we require proof of an EFIN (the electronic filing license granted by the IRS to individual accountants). We do e-filing because it’s more accurate and you get your acceptance and refund a lot faster than with a mailed return.
You can choose to receive your refund in the mail or via direct deposit to your bank account. If you owe money on your return, these same two options are available to you.
We are integrated with a secure third-party payment processor called Stripe, which allows you to pay your accountant online via credit card. At the end of the onboarding process, you’ll be given a price quote which is based on the information you provided earlier in onboarding. This price quote reflects a schedule we’ve agreed to with the accountants on our platform. We think you’ll find the rates highly competitive with independent CPA prices in your area. Picnic’s commission is paid by the accountant so you pay nothing on top of the price quoted to you at the end of onboarding.

We’ll give you clear instructions after you match with your accountant but rest assured it is super easy:

1) If you’ve got your tax docs available electronically, you can upload them directly to the Picnic website (either on desktop or on your phone).

2) If you only have paper copies of your documents, not to worry either. All you need to do in this case is snap a photo of your documents using your smartphone. You’ll then be able to upload them to the Picnic website directly from your phone. Of course, if you prefer, you can also email them to yourself as an attachment and upload them to the Picnic website from your desktop. It’s up to you!

Accordion ContentFrom a technical perspective, we enforce Transport Layer Security, or TLS, on all communication between you and our server. TLS is a widely adopted security protocol designed to facilitate privacy and data security for communications over the Internet. TLS encrypts the communication between our web application and our servers, thereby eliminating any possible theft of information while sending or receiving data. The small amount of user data that is stored follows the highest standards for data security and is hosted in data centers provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS), the leader in cloud services.