Level 2

Viewing Data with Lacerte SDK

Forum|Forum|7 months ago
December 18, 2025
1 reply
32 views

I am a developer working for a small CPA firm. I am trying to write a small C# console app that will help my firm price their returns. Right now the process is manual and time consuming. I've managed to get the Lacerte tax program installed with sample data, but I'm not an accountant and am having a hard time trying to figure out where the data that I need to check for lives.

I was able to set up an ODBC connector to read the data using a query string, but the data doesn't come back in a format that I'm able to interpret. I would appreciate any help you could provide, whether that be a class object, a mapping document, or something that could help set me on the right path.

Thanks!

Steffan

Level 4

Hi GameFire,

I would check out these files as a starting point:

"C:\Lacerte\24tax\2024.14.10.0\ind\usdbdef.i24"

Where "C:\Lacerte\" is your install path and "24tax" is the year of the program you're working with. Starting with 2024, there is a versioned subfolder here "2024.14.10.0", then the module "ind".

The usdbdef file contains all the database columns and a map to what they mean. The only exception is the DATA7 table, which seems to populate columns as those forms are encountered in the tax program, so there is no single reference to what they mean.

Hope this helps!

Best,

Steffan

G

GameFireAuthor

Level 2

Thanks Steffan,

I had found the usdbdef.i24 file, converted it to as CSV and took a look at it but I think my lack of knowledge on accounting is doing me a disservice. I found a post here earlier pointing to that and giving a list of what each of the columns meant. (I've been trying to find it to link it here, but I haven't been able to)

The columns I got were as follows

TableNumber

FieldNumber

Description

ShortDescription

FieldType

FieldLength

Column 1

Column 2

Column 3

Column 4

Column 5

Column 6

Column 7

Column 8

Column 9

ToggleType

Column 10

Some important things that I need to be able to query on are

Number of W2/1099R

Number of Sch B

Number of non-zero lines in the Current Year Depreciation Schedule

Are these things that I could find in the usdbdef.i24 file?

P

Philip24

Level 2

use the client detail table. I query how many prefix are used in the series need (11: w2, 12: interest, 55: k1 1065... and so on) Also if you fetch code number 800 for these, it will tell you the description used

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