CCH® SureTax® vs. Intuit Lacerte

SureTax has been the perfect solution; not only are they readily available to fix any and all of your questions, but they are also extremely attentive regarding the information requested. They are the best when it comes to entrepreneurs who are entering into a space that they are not fully aware of from a state and local tax compliance perspective. They can be better from the perspective of developing their client interface.

Incentivized

Lacerte helps to serve a great variety of clients and businesses, it has over 5,700 forms. It also supports multi-state, K-1s, and more. It suits for power users with high business inflow. Its useful for a CPA who is processing a high value firm or individual with zero errors. The error diagnostic feature covers more than 25k error checks. This is less applicable to CPA's whose are managing regular individual 1040 routines.

Incentivized

• The product is optimized to handle invoices with large number of line items. We've fast response times even on invoices with hundreds of thousands of line items.
• It is a SaaS solution which saves costs, increases maintainability and is entirely web based
• REST API is efficient, logically laid out and effortless to use

Incentivized

• Continually updates when bugs are found or tax law change
• Live customer suppprt
• Listen s to customer to improve product
• E-signature to get signed forms from remote customers
• Organizers for customer to complete on paper or electronic
• Tax appointment scheduling within the program and recurring for future appointments
• Client invoices by form
• Trial balance from accounting software to save time on business data entry

Incentivized

• In my opinion, the productivity website is clunky and limited. It's better than it used to be but still needs lots of work.
• It seems a little too difficult to get an answer when sometimes all I need is a quick what taxes apply in this area.
• In my experience, sales people are WAY TOO PUSHY. They need to understand that us users aren't always the decision makers and that there can be 3 levels of approval that the "negotiations" have to go through. So getting pushy and frustrated with us users is not the way to get the service agreements extended.

Incentivized

• The updates from IRS to Lacerte need to be improved, so far so good.
• Reporting needs to be improved. Feature like sorting categories. scorp/ind/non-profit
• Tax summaries can be improved - like the differentiation between rental income & expenses. I trust this feature would be a great help.

Incentivized

We switched our tax service from Avalara to SureTax years ago. Prior to this, we manually prepared the data and ran a report uploading and then got the tax result every time. With Suretax providing enough and flexable APIs, we redesigned and implemented our new application to communicate with SureTax seamlessly and automatically. This greatly reduced our workload, improves the system efficiency, and increased the data accuracy.

SureTax is very reliable in with the integration with Microsoft Dynamics GP. It provides accurate tax calculations in accordance with tax updates. SureTax also has a user-friendly interface that makes it easy to navigate. It is easy to add customers and also run reports on the website. The overall manageability of it is great!

Incentivized

It has taken much longer than we would like to get certain issues - and problems - resolved. And the initial product support as we designed the implementation left much to be desired

Incentivized

Lacerte customer service has been great. They are very knowledgeable about the product and can help resolve problems quickly.

Incentivized

I currently use or have used the products above or versions of them - I use Rev.io the billing platform, not the PSA, I no longer use Sage 100, we are currently using Sage 300, more on the server version than the cloud version - but we have it configured to talk to both. So CCH® SureTax® is just another tool in the toolbelt as it stacks up against the rest. Everything has its place and time. Sage300 handles the bulk of the accounting, Rev.io does the billing, CCH® SureTax® handles the tax. That's the simplest way to explain it. I don't have to spell out how much complexity goes behind those statements. If you're an accountant, you know.

Incentivized

I’ve heard other tax preparers talk about their software and their likes and dislikes. When I offer to show them Intuit Lacerte most are blown away by what it does. One preparer used ProConnrct online tax (also by Intuit), and she loves how easy Intuit Lacerteis to use. She said having live support (not chat) to actually be able to show issues and work through them was great. Both programs use the same calculations, but the extras (trial balance, organizers with prior year data, invoicing, scheduling, filters, etc) are what makes Intuit Lacerte the best!

Incentivized

• positive impact on resources due to accessibility by more team members
• positive impact on resources due to willingness of other team members to use this GUI - it's more inviting
• positive impact on timing due to strict deadlines so I simply CANNOT be pulled off to help with other projects which often happened when deadlines were later in the month
• once the prepayment module is put into production that is also going to help with tracking (for states like FL, GA etc. where the number only changes once/year because we're told SureTax will "remember" that month to month and keep it filled in on each return)

Incentivized

• It has helped meet overall business goals.
• Gives you the ability to add in and purchase only what you need.

Incentivized