One page organizer list of documents needed

[Tax1040]

Please consider a one page list of the documents and items needed from a client.  Many clients do not need/want to complete the organizers. We want to give them a list of all the specific W-2s, 1099s, they had last year.  A similar list is generated with the Link program but there is no way to get it as a printable list.  Other tax software offer this and I think it would be tremendously helpful. Thank you

[KristineM]

Proseries had this for years.  I am not sure why Lacerte does not.

[jctaxes]

I made my own.

[Tax Dude_So Cal]

We are not programmers so we should not have to resort to what DataBaseRobert suggests. And if Proseries has had this for years, why doesn't Lacerte?

We pay top dollar for Lacerte. I believe this would be very simple programming on their part and it should be provided to us automatically. We should definitely not be required to make our own.

[Pacific CPA]

4 years I have asked, so far crickets.   Likely they want you to use Intuit Link which unfortunately brands Intuit and not your firm, not to mention it is not the best user experience.  We would LOVE to have the list as we work off it.  We have had some success with the SDK, but it seems to be a version or two behind and a bit of work just to get it running, much less mapping all the codes.   Data is there, why not give it to us?

[DatabaseRobert]

Given that it took twenty years for them to open up the *data* in the first place...
  I know that I was banging that drum before the turn of the millenium.  "Here we do the return, we have where they work, how much they make, where they bank, where their investments are...  and Lacerte is willing to tell us, "total wages"."  Not a whole hell of a lot of help.

To be fair, I was using one of the (Yahoo!group's) Lacerte Tax User Group's member's Visual Basic utility since about 2009 or so.  He was able to open, read, and export/save the binary data file as plain text, which I then went and parsed out into a data table.

And before that, my "normal daily routine" was to Alt+P(rint) | C(lient detail) out to a text file, for everyone that I was doing an electronic transmission for, and parse *those* into a data table.  Then after the end of tax season, I would go find "everyone else" (that was not filed electronically), and generate all of those at once.  Since efiling was easily 95+% of our client list, this was not terribly onerous.

ODBC connection was released in 2018, so  yeah, twenty years.

And once you *HAVE* all of the data...  you can do anything you want with it.  "Find me all spouses under the age of 35 working at Lockheed-Martin with a W-2 over 80,000 and a Schedule C with home office, where the client has no W-2 at all BUT has a Partnership in CA."



Robert Kirk
LTUGtools

[Tax Dude_So Cal]

The data is there and they already provide a checklist within Intuit Link. It would be very simple for them to provide the checklist we want. I believe they are actively withholding this feature as an attempt to force us to use Intuit Link, which I have no desire to do.

[DatabaseRobert]

I think that's the more likely mindset: "we have a (paid!) product which includes what you want, why should we devote the manpower & energy to splitting it out to an (unpaid) side product?"

And as a happy coincidence, they can feel warm & fuzzy about having made it possible for people sufficiently interested to do their own (== ODBC connection).



Robert

[Strongsilence-CPA]

A short organizer from Lacerte s is asking for too much. 

[stacycpa]

Lacerte, please listen to you customers!  You are not serving our needs. This is not too much of an ask- we pay our fees to you and your restricting access to our data. 

[amec]

This is listed as under review, but here we are, the next tax season, and as far as I can tell, there is no organizer like this available at this time. Has a decision been made? This would be very useful for many clients.