Review of lacerte and tax season decompression

[Strongsilence-CPA]

The AICPA has a nice discussion right now about tax season.  And it would be nice for our community to have something similar in a chat\ or other forum.

Do you want to share tips, trick and benefits of Lacerte?  Intuit gets a lot of criticism and much of that is fair. I'd like to stick in this thread to what is valuable, useful, and even great about the software.

Off the top of my head:

- love the display's capability to organize and present everything I need to know about a client and a tax return. It's all in one place.

- love the Critical Diagnostics.  Once it alerted me to changes I had made to a return that I was going to send to a client. It would have been embarrassing to send it.

- like the information. As a solo, I don't have a review and the info diagnostics are very helpful.  (I'm sure there could be more.)

- the tech support with experience has been good, in my opinion.

To give you an idea of my tax season: I prepared and filed 125 tax returns (110 individuals and have 60 on extension.) I'm a solo with only a little bit of admin help.  More tax returns would be possible for me next season, only if I make serious improvements to client information gathering.

[Karl]

Fantastic idea!

My practice is a bit smaller than yours (120 1040s, 15 S-Corps), and I ended up with 45% on extension (higher than I wanted, but I had my wife & kids round-robin colds through Feb & Mar, so I was Dad-on-duty more than expected).

I'm the solo preparer, and I have two part-time (25%-ish) staff: one admin for return processing, and one accounting clerk to help with my two bigger QBO bookkeeping clients.

I appreciate Lacerte's keyboard shortcuts. Some favorites are

• CTRL+DOWN arrow, jumps to the same field among multiple entries on a screen (like marking multiple depr assets disposed)
• CTRL+W jumps to batch entry and back, to help troubleshoot/reviews entry errors like multi-state allocations, etc.

I also like how generally straightforward it is to customize and sort what items print in each version of the returns.

I also love the "delete next year" feature so that when I know something isn't repeating, I can make sure it won't proforma so I don't mistakenly ask the client for a supposedly missing but nonexistent CY form the next year.

[Strongsilence-CPA]

@Karl 

I'm the solo preparer, and I have two part-time (25%-ish) staff: one admin for return processing, and one accounting clerk to help with my two bigger QBO bookkeeping clients.

I'm impressed that you have staff. Maybe I'm not billing enough.

I will keep the keyboard shortcuts in mind. CTRL+DOWN arrow, jumps to the same field among multiple entries on a screen.  WOW! that looks like a faster way to navigate.

And I agree that the printing options are very useful.

Reminder to myself: Got to the suggestions discussions to see what improvements are proposed.