Because I hunted down somebody who is a wizard with Adobe PDFs, and he beat the organizers into submission for me.
Backstory: We started emailing out PDFs--fundamentally duplicating the IRS' behavior "turn tax preparers into their data entry folks", and instead "shifting our printing costs to clients if they want to print the organizer"--in January of 2011 from the TY2010 software. Naturally, many clients asked, "why can't we just type into it?" I explained that the multi-billion-dollar company Intuit did not make that possible with the PDF organizers that they generated. Fast forward to when, in calendar 2018, I was given a reference to David's company (that is his site to which I posted the link) and he collaborated with me to take source pages that have fields on them, recognize the text of the page-header at the top (year, fed/state, page to use) and lay the relevant fields out onto them. So for the 2018, 2019, 2020, and now 2021 tax years, we have had fillable PDFs to send to clients.
If you--or any user here--would like a sample copy of our 2020 blank organizer, please feel free to write me at "[email address removed] ". (Paradox is the database program that I did many years of manipulation of Lacerte information via, and so hence also my handle here: DatabaseRobert. Yes, I can consult about ODBC connections/direct manipulation of Lacerte data tables & detail files, if anyone is interested in that, either.)
The 2021 is still getting the intro pages re-written, so not yet ready for prime time. We typically send them all out in mid-January, after Congress is (largely) finished re-writing tax law.
And no-one should feel too badly about me flacking an advert here, either: I have sent (blank) sample copies of our finished product to "all of the programmers' email addresses that I have for Lacerte/Intuit" on a regular basis, so there's a good dozen of them that know that it *can* be done.
I will say in their defense that it is not an easy task. They start with fields on the page (where they put the prior year information). Then they turn all of the pages into "no fields". There may or may not be field code numbers (because when we generate Organizers, we can choose not to show them). Then there need to be fields laid on for the client to use. How about that "grid of columns" on page 11/12 Int/Div, or page17/22 asset sales? Or--true client of ours--the guy with 40+ rental properties, so "page18/1 #1", "page18/2 #1", "page18/1 #2", "page18/2 #2", ... "page18/47 #1", "page18/47 #2"...
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Unfortunately, no: Adobe Acrobat full version (I think "DC", with no numbering any more, is the most up-to-date). He works only with that base program, not any of the third-party software that also deal with PDFs. Since a single-user license is about a hundred bucks even if you do NO price shopping, we did not feel that it was anything too onerous for an accounting firm. And only one license for Adobe is needed: there is the ability to set up an "Action" in Adobe, point to some number of files/an entire folder, and say "process them all." For handy reference, we include the file needed to do that in the ZIP with the pages of fields. Between 11:36am and 6:07pm one day this past January, my machine churned its way through 566 (of our 2,554 total) INDividual Organizers All told I was done with all of them between January 26th through the 30th. (Later than usual this year, because the front pages were--still!--being re-written.)
