I’ve been harping about this for years on this forum, and there’s been no action taken.
There’s probably a good chance, if Intuit is watching, that they won’t do anything radical because the bulk of the Lacerte accountants are change-adverse. No change means no improvement. Their Administrative function has always been archaic. No improvements on the text processing feature for attaching notes to the return in the last 40 years since I’ve been a user. Pagination is still janky on the custom letter feature and has never been fixed.
We see many Lacerte tax returns in our bookkeeping practice, and many don’t even go as far as customizing the opening salutation from “Dear Client” on the cover letter or filing instructions.
Tech support told me a few years ago that the most frequent issue reported is that the users have the caps lock key engaged, so that’s why they can’t log in to their program. That’s how backwards the bulk of Lacerte users are.
Perhaps Lacerte doesn’t want to upset their users, since their defection rate is greater than their acquisition rate, mostly because of their REP pricing is too high, and next, because of their shoddy tech support gets worse every year.
This could mean that the whole tax prep community will go down the tubes with Lacerte to obsolescence as the disrupters take over with AI and put us all out of business. None of the other major players are doing much in the way of modernization either, so the whole bunch of us lemmings will go over the cliff together.
Drake is impossible to use, but has the greatest market share, about 40%, because it’s the cheapest on the market, irrespective of the fact that it’s the least efficient major program available. Staff works harder and longer with Drake, but practice owners must be myopic about it, probably because it’s so cheap. Poor economy and backwards business decisions plague most tax practitioners who are struggling with pricing pressure from price-driven, commodity-oriented tax clients.
One thing still favorable about paper organizers is that they’re low tech, and clients can write on them all over the pages and margins with notes, albeit some of them have illegible handwriting. In those cases, I ask the client to resubmit, politely, of course.
There’s hardly anything about a pencil that can go wrong, and it’s easy to use. Plus, they come with erasers. Brilliant!
