Lacerte Hosting experience

[RF]

Looking for anyone willing to share your experiences regarding the official Lacerte hosting environment.  We are considering it but getting references from current users has been left up to us which feels like a red flag.  Feel free to [email removed, please use the Private message feature in the right hand corner] (if you don't want to post publicly)  

For background, we have been Lacerte users for the entirety of our firm's history (22 years) and took over the user account from our predecessor firm that had been users back into the DOS days.  (We are a team of 3 users year round with 5 users during the season and prepare ~ 900 returns annually.)

For the last two years we have utilized a cloud server through our IT vendor which has been about 90% good.  We are considering jumping on the Intuit bandwagon for hosting (like everything else) but don't want to go from the frying pan to the fryer.  Support is a big deal so moving to a huge providers begs the question about how is support and is it often needed?

[Strongsilence-CPA]

Someone asked about hosting a few months back so you might search for that.

I am a solo. Hosted combines good IT support and it is faster than my previous desktop environment.  I don't have an inhouse IT support and my workflow was getting bogged down with miscellaneous computer problems. I'm happy. (Support seems knowledgeable but two people I have contacted can't figure out how to convert from Proseries to LC. That might be a flag for you.)

[RF]

Great feedback.  Thank you.  Searching the community posts hasn't provided much which is why I threw the question out in general.

[Strongsilence-CPA]

You are welcome.

Update to my Tech Support rating:  2 folks from Hosted Tech Support did not know how to convert ProSeries to Lacerte.  The latest suggested a solution that I'm finding to be convoluted and time-consuming for me.  So my rating is one notch lower for tech support.

[sjrcpa]

Are you referring to converting ProSeries data files to Lacerte?

Or changing hosting from ProSeries to Lacerte?

If the former, I would not expect the hosting Support people to know this. If the latter, they should.

[dfa]

Our firm sounds very similar in size to yours. We tried it for about a month last year hoping that it would process/calculate quicker than our server. There was no noticeable difference. They use Rightnetworks as a remote desktop. Because we already log in to our server via remote desktop, it made navigating more difficult using two remote desktops and our local desktop, and so we ditched it. The conversion took about a day. Converting back took less time. A scary issue occurred during the end of the conversion process. Another CPA firm's clients began to proforma in to ours which defeated the whole "more secure" aspect of hosting. I never got an explanation as how it happened.

[RF]

Great info.  Thank you for taking the time to reply.  We were considering this if it could entirely replace our current cloud server but this doesn't seem life a safe assumption either.

[TaxGuyBill]

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@dfa wrote:

A scary issue occurred during the end of the conversion process. Another CPA firm's clients began to proforma in to ours which defeated the whole "more secure" aspect of hosting. I never got an explanation as how it happened.

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I would have contacted all of those people, and informed them that Intuit is distributing their private information to random people.

[Strongsilence-CPA]

Thank you for your comment. 

[dfa]

Only 5-10 made it through before I could cancel the transfers, and I deleted them without opening. We deal with sensitive info daily and so aren't totally rando people, but in retrospect, I agree, it would have been good to call one to find out who their CPA is to inform them of the breach.

[michele]

I wonder when they are going to push us all to the cloud. I pay plenty and got my renewal and if I move to the cloud $23300.00   With Lacerte. I have always hated the thought of moving a large client base to Thomason Reuters but it is looking better all the time. Just getting ridiculous Just found out. After 8 years with e-file cabinet they are now saying only cloud so might as well go with smart vault if I have to be in the cloud. The cloud makes it difficult when you have some seasonal staff. Their solution is to have someone in charge of deactivating support staff at the end of shift and reactivate beginning shifts. Who has time for all that .

UGH

Michele

[larrygrussell1]

Thank You RF so much for your Hosting discussion thread.  We want User Experience before we decide.  We are attending the 2024 IRS Nationwide Tax Forum in Sand Diego Sept 10 - 11 and will spend time at the Lacerte booth to hear what Lacerte says - But we also want the User Experience input and perhaps we will meet some Lacerte Hosting customers and chat them up.  If so we will certainly ask them to post their Hosting comments here to your Hosting thread RF.

We are Lacerte users since 1988 and have all years of Lacerte 1988 thru 2023 working  (Lacerte  1988 thru 2005 are run on a Windows 11 machine in a "Windows Virtual Machine running Windows XP, and Lacerte 2006 thru 2023 are on the Windows 11 and run natively).  Both Microsoft and Oracle offer Windows Virtual Machines if you are interested.  We are two preparers with two computers, mine is Windows 11 and is both Server and my Workstation, the second computer is a Windows 10 Workstation which we will upgrade to Windows 11 after October 15 deadlines.

We see definite advantages of the "cloud" in general and like the idea that a much simpler and cheaper workstation could access Lacerte Online (and a laptop from anywhere with internet for those interested).  If I come to work and find my office building has burned to the ground, I'm a laptop with internet away from continuing with tax season.  The "building burned to the ground" actually happened to a fellow tax preparer whose computer and onsite backups also burned - his tax season was ruined.  

Each year our practice has become more paperless and we "print" more to pdf only than ever and are finding more clients use Intuit Link each year.  Tax Year 2023 is the last year that we will print a paper organizer for every single client since so many skipped their paper organizer and used the Intuit Link organizer instead.

But Lacerte's "execution" of Hosting and the actual user experience, not just the theory, are critical in our decision.  We need it but just don't have it.

Please post your comments, experience, and questions to this thread.

Please and thank you.

[RF]

Larry.  You are on the right track to talk to other hosting users.  We "tested" it for part of the offseason last year when this thread started and unfortunately went a different direction entirely that ended up being very bad.  After that experience, I wished we had stayed with hosted Lacerte for the actual season to see how it went.  (At the time we were experiencing some speed issues with hosted QB desktop files and my team just wasn't having it so we jumped from the Rightworks platform last fall in an effort to settle into the right thing before tax season. No major issues with Lacerte speed, just QuickBooks at the time.) 

What is definitely missing is local support and overall lack of understanding on the part of the techs in trying to nail down speed issues...it always came back to the system needing to be upgraded, etc. and we knew the experience was somehow hung-up elsewhere, not simply fixed by throwing more RAM at it.  (Hosted environments can get snagged up quickly with syncs and other things running in the background for AV, malware, Google, OneDrive, etc.)

We are now with a great local IT firm that hosts our server and provides support as needed.  We finally feel like we are "getting what we pay for" - we are paying a LOT but getting a lot in return.  I wouldn't count hosted Lacerte out, just keep in mind that local support is still needed.  Good luck!  

[LPSCPA1]

Hi Larry, 

We are also contemplating switching over to Intuit Hosting via RW Our main reason for this being the automation of updates (which are constant as you know). Our Firm is about 15 people, no in house IT - all support is outsourced to our IT Company. We use an array of programs - Lacerte, QBD, CCH engagement and Office Tools for practice management as well as some other ancillary software for payroll and such.

Curious if you ended up switching over to Intuit hosting with RW and any feedback you received while attending the conference in September? 

Our setup now is cloud based through Microsoft Azure. We have constant issues with speed and lagging. Also, our IT company has not figured out a way to automate the updates so they go in manually every morning during busy season to update Lacerte which is disruptive. 

Appreciate input from anyone in the Community. 

Thank you!

Andrew

[DatabaseRobertLTUG]

THE biggest thing about RightWorks is that you CANNOT install any of your own software, and you CANNOT "right-click" to do anything, and you CANNOT open  DOS command window to do any bulk actions.

If you do anything like that normally, your ONLY course is to export or copy from Hosted down to your local install.

On the bright side, RightWorks does all of your Lacerte updates for you, and they tell me they have data backups.  (I would still routinely pull down copies of the data tables/client & dependent data, with periodic [1-3 times / Season?] full copies of ALL the tax detail.)

[HINJ]

Do you know if your IT provider is using Azure Virtual Desktop?

[RF]

If this question was for me, I don't know the technical answer to that.  What I do know is that we connect to our server where Lacerte is loaded through a Citrix connection, but they gave us multiple options in this regard, Citrix being only one of them.