PDF Version of Organizer

[CPATerri]

My clients are requesting FILLABLE organizers.  Can you make this happen so we can stop with the paper organizers?   The e-organizer is not something most of my clients can work with so a fillable PDF would be great. 

[jimbocpa]

How many years can we make this request and still be ignored?  It's very frustrating to not be heard on something that seems so easy to fix.  The E Organizer and Intuit Link are simply not adequate.  A client can really foul up a return by putting stray information or making changes without our knowledge.  Get rid of these and focus on a fillable PDF!

[IRonMaN]

Well, it looks like they passed it on to the development team, who evidently passed it on to the interested team and reviewing it team.  Once those teams are done doing their jobs, you are probably only another 63 teams away from making it a reality. 😬

[tom5]

Perhaps 63 teams are down from the previous 85 teams.  Maybe they'll come to their senses just before the 2035 tax season, when all tax returns will be automatically filled out by the IRS and they'll send you a memo.   Then, they'll just withdraw the tax due from your electronic wallet.  Poof!  No more tax returns, no more Lacerte!  I'll be in 6th grade in my next lifetime when that happens.  You might as well bay at the moon than to expect Lacerte to suddenly become excellent and responsive.  

[LFM9600]

Okay Lacerte users,

What do you think if all call Lacerte help line daily until the development team gets the hint we are serious about the fillable PDF organizers!

Or Lacerte help line would you give us the phone number or email and we can bug your development team.

If you can get the fillable PDF organizers ready for this season, you won't regret it.

You will get many positive reviews and very very happy customers. 

Please work on this now.

[Robert Ades]

No, this is an example of "let's create a feedback poll so our customers think we are listening to them,"  when in fact they're note.

I've been a Lacerte customer since 1992 and ever since Intuit bought the company, its product development has ground to a complete halt. The last major piece of development came when Lacerte introduced mult-state tax reporting -- maybe 20 years ago.

[IRonMaN]

"No, this is an example of "let's create a feedback poll so our customers think we are listening to them," when in fact they're not"

Bingo!  For those that have been around long enough we know they have a wishing well to make you feel good, but if you check out the plumbing, you can see that all of the wishes get carried off to the sewage treatment plant.

[tom5]

Last time i asked a few year ago, tech support told me there were about 45,000 firms using Lacerte.  It's possibly down a little now, since Drake has taken some more of the market share.  Let's say it's 40,000 firms, or at least 100,000 preparers.  Of those, at this writing, less than 250 have joined this discussion about fillable PDF organizers. 

What does that say about the remaining 99,750 others who are blasie about this basic issue?  Lacerte can easily afford to lose all 250 of us, and it wouldn't matter to them an iota.   They can raise their fees $1.00 per preparer and more than make up for the revenue loss.  Indeed, maybe they would be glad to get rid of all of us trouble-makers in favor of appeasing the complacent and indifferent remainder with their continued baloney.   

As long as the other major competitors do not have fillable PDFs, there's no competitive disadvantage within our profession.  However, it's not the point.  The competition is outside the bubble of tax preparation community.  They have set the public's expectations, not the tax community.  It's the rest of the world which has made us look like backwards fools. 

It's a Hobson's Choice.  

[ShadyLady]

If they work, I agree that would be great.

E-Organizers have not worked well for us -

(1) We get so many calls for the few we send regarding E-Organizer related issues - if they are on a Mac, question if they were sent, issues opening, etc.

(2) They are more difficult to work with than the regular Organizer when using them for workpaper documentation.

[SusanLDiscountCPA]

I agree that Lacerte e-organizers did not work for me so I had been sending clients a copy of the paper organizer in pdf format as well as an Intuit Link. They hate that if they answer a questioin, they have problems going back to change their answer.  A pdf copy of the paper organizer would be the best solution.  Also I hate the Intuit Link's question and answers since I have to use the Snip it took to print and then scan in pdf the answers.  I am thinking of removing the questions and downloading in the Intuit Link the pdf copy of the organizer as well as emailing it password protected to my clients to tell me if there are any yes answers.  This is one of the reasons, I was ready to try other tax return providers this year.

[DatabaseRobert]

As one of the creators of the utility that I have previously linked to--and thanks for the shouts out from the other posters who *ALSO* posted a link!--I wanted to give everyone here notice that the 2021 version is updated and ready:
 [removed] 

There is also a discount code (20% off) for readers of this thread:
  PDF_Fill_I

(The middle part is the word "Fill", the final part is the capital letter "eye", as in "Intuit community page"; the separators are "_"/underscore.)

Note again that this simply lays fillable fields over the PDF pages generated from Lacerte (with the "complete" organizer only). Primarily this is useful for legibility--rather than reading each client's different chicken-scratch handwriting--as well as Find, Zooming size, and copy/paste for long entries.
This WILL NOT take data from the Organizer and populate it into the Lacerte program. (We have made some small inroads on that, but it is... daunting.)

And again, this works ONLY for the INDividual module. (The page headers for the FIDuciary module are laid out differently, so they will take additional work... and no other module even generates an Organizer.)

I hope that everyone has a happy holiday season!

Robert Kirk
LTUGtools