Intuit Lacerte vs. Proconnect Tax Online

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

It has been well suited to amend a return when I had a client that needed to get it amended. There wasn't any additional charge. When it wasn't well suited was when I had another tax return from a previous CPA and couldn't import it so I had to re-create the return.

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

• Cloud Based: The world is moving towards cloud based software and Intuit is on top of its game with ProConnect.
• Tight Integration with Quickbooks Online (QBO): This is a real bonus if you are using QBO and want to integrate the client's Trial Balance into ProConnect.
• Excellent Client Portal (IntuitLink): Using IntuitLink which is built into ProConnect, you can share document requests and documents with your client. You've also got a very user friendly visual "Client Organizer" rather than the clunky pile of paper based forms that many firms still use.
• Support: Excellent online chat & support for resolving any issue while working in the software.
• Flexible Pricing: Purchase as many returns as you need for tax season.

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

• Not very many software titles outside the Intuit family can be used to integrate with the product.
• The UI is a bit dated looking.
• Can get rather costly if larger volumes of returns are prepared.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

The support is, excellent and Intuit overall provides good support. Their customer service representatives are friendly and always assist with issues when needed. There are multiple ways to contact the support team. I have not sued them though very much for technical tax issues and primarily the customer service team when needed.

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

For many of the reasons previously stated in the review (ie. cloud based, client portal, QBO integration), I am a big fan of ProConnect Tax Online. Many competing products have been around far longer (Drake, for example, was one of the original collaborators with the IRS on the original e-file data format protocol). However, even given its shorter history, Intuit has shown again that it is a very innovative, cutting edge company that has loaded the product with tremendous features and rich functionality. I highly recommend the product, especially if you are running a tax practice that is more modern and makes use of technology.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Just being the administrative assistant I can't really talk on ROI - that would be for my boss to address. But since our office strives to be completely paperless efiling fits in with our paperless narrative.

Incentivized