Should I buy Tax Planner or not?

[Strongsilence-CPA]

I have never used the Tax Planner feature and I'm not sure whether I want to buy it with less than a week prior to the Jan. 15 ES payment deadline.  Your advice would be appreciated.  I'm tempted to wait, or hope, for a LC update early next week so my 2020 projection can be more accurate and reliable. But I have a client with 2 passthroughs and rentals with passive losses and QBI is a significant factor.  Again, some of you have opinions and I appreciate any opinion you have.

[abctax55]

I believe the Lacerte Tax Planner is part of the package; just download it.

[Karl · Accepted solution]

Lacerte Tax Planner is included for free.  But a couple caveats.

I'm having issues rolling over tax *plans* from 2019 to 2020.  PY data sometimes gets deleted. I haven't cared enough to spend an hour on hold to ask Intuit to look into it.  So heads up, your issue may be served better by downloading the 2019 Tax Planner if you want to export the 2019 return as a base for your 2020 plan.

Also, I think in the planner that QBI-eligible income has to be separately input (whereas in Lacerte it's usually just an [O] field). Not sure about every screen, but just a heads up to watch for that since you said you need accuracy specifically in that arena.

Kind of as a summary to the above, Lacerte Tax Planner is a decent tool, but it's the redhead stepchild (IMO) of Lacerte. For all the effort (or lack thereof) Intuit puts into Lacerte coding cleanup, notably less is in the Planner. So maintain professional skepticism of your bottom line results (math errors happen), challenge assumptions, etc.

Good luck!

[Strongsilence-CPA]

Thank you. That is very helpful.

[Strongsilence-CPA]

Thank you.

[abctax55]

FWIW... and you would have to pay for it... try CFS TaxTools.  They have a tax planner that is very easy to use.  I've tried Lacerte's; I usually end up in tears.😉