Now, more than ever, we absolutely need User Definable Fields. I need the ability to put what I have traditionally had on paper into "bits" and do not have a place to put it. I have previously submitted this as a Product Suggestion and will be including a link to this post in another shortly.
We try to think of Lacerte as our "System of Record", but it's not very good at this. We export data for email (Here's your Organizer) and other uses, but the data we need to process tax returns does not really work well as a contact management solution. Family relationships are complex; and about 20% of our clients are also a responsible party (POC at least) for their children or parents. Lacerte offers me NO WAY to effectively manage these relationships. We can all guess (know) what a 17 year old will do with a Tax Organizer. Lacerte and other companies want us to think that this all fits in a nice little structured DB, but it does not.
I spent 5 hours today doing a mailing to our clients (Sanitizing the export) and this should have taken no more than an hour!
I will suggest a number of (20) fields of at least 40 Alpha-Numeric characters each as part of the Client Information section for each Tax Type (though I expect there are other places users may want these too, trying to walk here). They need to be exportable with the Client => Export => Export to File and should be configured as part of Primary Settings to:
- Display (Yes\No),
- Have a definable Label (Field Title)
- Have what I will call a Proforma setting (copy content to next year or not).
- They should upgrade both config and content (as selected) to a new year of the Lacerte program.
The "Why" should not be important, UDF should say it all, but here is some of what I need:
- Responsible Guardian - Kids and seniors don't always do their own returns.
- Responsible Guardian Email -
- Responsible Guardian Relationship - (Child, Parent, Other)
- Send correspondence via - Surface Mail or Email
- Send Organizer Via - We currently have 3 ways to distribute an organizer, who gets what type.
- Send E-File Via - Paper, E_signature, Secure Portal
- Primary Contact - Taxpayer or Spouse
- Primary Contact email -
- Primary Contact Salutation -
- So many other items
Many other software products have this capability at multiple levels of the DB Hierarchy. Sure, field types, drop downs, radio buttons and check boxes would all be nice, but I will be happy with a text field.
... and No, keeping this info outside of Lacerte does not work well, doing it now.
OH, and how about making the Middle Initial\Name a field of it's own. It's not hard to put it in it's own cell in excel, but I should not have to.
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