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3 Play Media is a company based out of Massachusetts that provides
captioning and transcription services to their clients. For a while now
they have had an interesting work from home position listed — transcript
editor.
Note that this company does require that you be a US
resident with a college degree before they will consider you as a
transcript editor. You will be working as an independent contractor for
the company.
What does a transcript editor do?
From the job description:
We
are looking for flex-time contract transcriptionists/editors to
transcribe recorded audio and edit imperfect transcription using a
proprietary internet-based software application.
While searching for an online medical transcription school to sign up
for, I did a vast amount of research on the options to be sure that I
would make the right decision. Most medical transcription schools are
not worth much in terms or training or their ability to prepare you to
succeed in a career in the field. Unfortunately, most people don’t
realize this until they have already spent their money and time on these
programs and graduated—at which point they are unable to find a job.
Employers know that graduates of many programs are not fully prepared to
begin working, so they will not even consider their job application
unless the individual already has years of working experience in
transcribing medical records.
Intuit is a very well-known company that you’ve likely heard of. They
are behind the popular QuickBooks, TurboTax, Mint.com, and several
other things. What you might not have known is that Intuit hires people
to work from home as tax advisors. These are often seasonal positions
although you will sometimes see them advertise for year-round workers.
If you have the right credentials and would prefer to avoid the daily
commute, Intuit might be a good company to consider working for. I have
done some research on their home-based tax advisors positions and
provided those details for you below.
Intuit hires tax advisors in the US and Canada.
How much do Intuit tax advisors make?
The
rate of pay isn’t listed on the website, but it’s rumored to be $18 per
hour, possibly a little more. Apparently Intuit’s tax advisors used to
get a really nice bonus in addition to their pay — up to $8,000 per
season — but I don’t see mention of that on the current job posting, so
I’m not sure it’s anything they still offer.
What does the job entail?
As
a tax advisor for Intuit, you work from home helping out customers who
contact Intuit about their TurboTax products. You’ll be handling
inquiries that come through via phone, email, and chat. I did read at Work Place Like Home on a thread
that was a couple of years old where someone had this job previously
and only handled email and chat inquiries, which essentially means her
position was non-phone. However, I don’t think you can choose that
option when you apply. From what I read, it sounded like Intuit decided
to let this person handle email and chat only because she was better at
those kinds of inquiries.
What experience do you need?
There is a long list of requirements, so I’ve just copy/pasted from the job posting what Intuit is looking for:
- Must possess ACTIVE credentials for one of the following: EA (Enrolled Agent) or CPA (Certified Public Accountant)
- Must possess active PTIN.
- Extensive knowledge of tax laws.
- Experience using major tax preparation software. Experience with electronic filing a plus.
- Minimum
5 years experience preparing federal and state returns either
individual (1040) or business (1120, 1120S, 1065, 1041, 990, 706).
- Able to research IRS and state publications, regulations, and GAAP publications.
- Experience discussing complex tax topics or situations.
- Must have excellent verbal and written communication skills. Bilingual a plus.
- Strong software troubleshooting abilities a plus.
- Ability to work with minimal supervision.
What is the schedule like?
Intuit
usually has both full- and part-time remote positions available. If you
are full-time, you can expect to be working about 40 hours per week,
and part-time may be around 30 hours per week.
How is the application process?
Someone posted about their Intuit seasonal tax advisor interview at Glassdoor.
This person applied through a recruiter and claimed the entire process
took three weeks. There was a two-part test, the first part covering
your tax knowledge and the other part covering your English skills. If
you make it through that, there is a phone interview. The test and
interview is supposedly not terribly difficult if you know your tax
stuff, but you need to have your reference materials handy in case you
get a question you’re not sure about and need to look it up quickly.
Feedback
The
bullet list below will take you to various places online where this
position has been discussed or reviewed. The forums don’t have a ton of
feedback from people who are actually doing or have done this job, but
there’s a little there. Overall, it seems everyone has had a positive
experience working from home for Intuit. If you meet the qualifications
and know you can put in the hours, this would probably be a good job to
get.
Getting Started
You will need to visit Intuit’s website
to see if they currently have openings for remote tax advisors. Type in
“remote” in the job keyword search box at the top of the page. If they
have any openings, you’ll see them listed. Good luck!
Are you interested in other companies that have work from home accounting/bookkeeping positions? Check out the list in my directory.
If you’re new to general transcription and would like to get some
paid practice in, CastingWords is a company to consider. They are a US
based company that has existed since 2005. CastingWords usually posts
their jobs on Amazon Mturk and there are almost always some there to do
when I check. They also have a website where you can sign up directly
and work if you would prefer not to go through Mturk, although there are
advantages to using Mturk which we will discuss a bit later.
If you are completely unfamiliar with general transcription, you may want to read this post first.
SigTracker is a company I found through the Work Place Like Home
forum several months ago that recruits home-based workers for data
entry. The work you do for them involves updating voter registrations
for various states. I held off on writing about SigTracker for some time
because there are so many data entry scams out there and I just wasn’t
sure about this one. But since that time, many people have done work for
the company and been paid as promised.
This opportunity is for US
residents only, and you do have to verify your citizenship before they
will accept you. You can verify this through Elance, which is where you
have to sign up to do the work.
Transcribe Team has frequently advertised that they have work from
home transcription openings available over the last several months. I
took a closer look today and I see that this is one of those companies
where no experience in transcription is actually needed to get started.
However, this also means low pay. As always, I recommend that you use
these low-pay transcription companies that hire beginners as a jumping
off point to better paying transcription jobs. You can expect to gain
some experience and earn a little extra money, but you might not do more
than that here.
CrowdSource is a company that recently bought out Cloud Crowd (do you
remember that one?). This company hires home-based workers to do short
tasks as well as writing and editing jobs. Some of you may already be
familiar with CrowdSource thanks to the many different tasks they post
at Amazon Mturk. I know I’ve seen them and done a few on there myself.
The work you do for CrowdSource is through the Amazon Mturk platform
as of now. However, I read on their blog that they are working on
something that will allow you to do work for CrowdSource outside of the
Mturk system.
You can do work for CrowdSource no matter where
you’re at in the world, but it is my understanding that you can’t get
paid via bank transfer from Mturk if you’re outside the United States. I
believe you can still work for deposits into your Amazon account that
you can use for shopping if you are outside the US. Hopefully if
CrowdSource gets their own work platform set up, it will allow non-US
workers to get paid, too.
