Lacerte failure

[MikeM2]

Why do the Lacerte files disappear from our server?  (This 19Tax folder was, essentially, emptied.)  Today was the 2nd time this week that this happened.  It happened 4 times during tax season last year and another time last May.  Our outside IT people made all of the adjustments that Lacerte recommended (including excluding Lacerte files from our backup - we will never do that again.)

Georeg4Tack's recommendation of reinstalling the program from the Websetup in the 19Tax folder is impossible because that doesn't exist in the folder and that won't restore the approx 1,000 client files.

We need to know how to prevent this from happening.  This has only happened with the Lacerte files.

[TomdeB]

We have been having a similar problem for a couple of years now. Files suddenly and randomly get corrupted or even on occasion disappear. Once this happens we cant get into them and sometimes Lacerte completely stops working for everyone on the network. This has been utterly frustrating - no solid help from Lacerte - our IT people keep doing the miraculous but still, files keep auto-corrupting. Sometimes shuts down the whole office and we have to reschedule clients and do damage control. All of our equipment is pretty new and Lacerte is the only issue. We can't go on running a business like this though...and for $15-20k a year it just keeps feeling better and better...

[MikeM2]

Thanks for the response.  We're glad to know that we're not the only ones with this problem that Lacerte Tech claims cannot happen.   It's only the Lacerte files.  After last year's mess, our IT support talked us into a Datto drive.  This has saved us twice this year already, but it has cost us since the IT service has to restore the files.  It would be far better if Lacerte was more stable.

[TomdeB]

Yes, that has been the only thing saving us - solid IT people and a very good backup (I think ours is every 2 hours or less) since Lacerte said the backup process itself could be the problem. Lacerte doesn't seem to have any real understanding of the dynamic causing such file and program instability on a network. We have files that simply "auto-corrupt" for no identifiable reason every few days or so and the whole program on a particular workstation freezes when you try to open one of these files - which you could have just been in within the last 24 hours... and the longer you take to address it as soon as you find out the more you risk a total network-wide Lacerte shutdown. This is the highlight of tax season when Lacerte is the backbone of your whole tax practice. At $15-20K plus a year it is utterly frustrating and unacceptable. We have been using Lacerte for over 20 years and it used to be very reliable. Not sure if the cloud version would eliminate all these headaches - Intuit is probably putting all of their concern in that basket and neglecting the desktop users like us prematurely... 

I'm thinking of putting a new banner at the bottom of my email signature:

“Like a good Captain goes down with the ship, we’re loving Lacerte until the bitter end!”

[TomdeB]

BTW, our IT guys are using the Lacerte CL Pack Tool to repair the program after any of these data corruption occurrences. There is a CL Pack Tool for each Lacerte year/version. It is a database compaction and re-indexing tool. They generally make a copy of the data file somewhere as a backup before running this tool (just in case). The tool seems to work pretty well and our own file backups are not usually necessary when using this. We have also enabled server shadow copies on our network for additional backup protection.