Intuit Lacerte vs. Sovos Intelligent Compliance Cloud

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

For eCommerce sites - make sure to integrate the sales tax engine with both the websites AND your ERP system so that the data written to the sales tax returns matches what you show in sales tax payable. Otherwise you will not be able to reconcile your GL Sales Tax Liability account.

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

• They are good at updating the tax tables with all the new sales tax law changes
• They are good at charging the correct sales tax amount as long as the software is set up or configured correctly
• They are good at following up at sales tax correspondences

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

• The admin portal needs work - I cannot simply add and remove users, and have to create a case support. I think this is a low-hanging fruit Sovos is working on to resolve.
• The UI could be improved.
• The sync does not always happen instantly and sometime can take up to 24 hours.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

For the most part, the support team is responsive. However, with the recent switch from a legacy server to S1 server, Sovos created a problem for us. We simply can't upload a tax certificate. I logged a case with support, and they could not help, so they escalate to their senior technician. All in all, it has been more than 7 days, and they could not resolve a "simple" issue.

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

We have reviewed TaxJar and Avalara, but ultimately decided to go with Sovos. Avalara should work well based on various due diligence we have. However, we don't like the "bait-and-switch" approach, and the pricing is not clear at all. There always seem to be hidden fees. We actually used Avalara for a few months before opting out completely. TaxJar was a strong contender. However, at the time, it does not integrate with our ERP system.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• We can focus on generating revenue and be confident that our sales tax is fully handled by Sovos.
• Sovos helps to eliminate any fines/penalties if we face an audit.
• Having a system such as Sovos saves on manual and prone-to-error work.

Incentivized