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]

I can't say enough great things about David at PDF Automation Station:

[removed]

He helped us get about 800 PDF organizers to be fillable and clients have been loving it!!!

Shame on Lacerte for not coming through, but Kudos to David for his help!

[smartcpa]

I printed out the organizers to PDF out of Lacerte (directly to SmartVault - so they went to each client's folder).

I then opened the PDF and made it fillable, saved it back to the client folder in the portal.  Clients can now fill in the organizer and upload it back to us.

You (not the client) would need to have Adobe Acrobat Pro or Kofax Power PDF to make the PDF document fillable.  Your only cost is purchasing the PDF software, and then you own it.

[JCL]

What command made it fillable or was this something to do with pdfautomationstation.com?

[smartcpa]

under the Forms tab, on the far left - Form Typer - Fillable Form

 

 

[Hobbes27]

I think this is a wonderful idea.  I am also getting clients asking me for the same thing.  I really hope Lacerte can make this happen for the 2022 tax season.

[AverettPC]

We just got this email from a client:

Hi,

Unfortunately, I am unable to use tax services with A&A this year for the 2021 tax period. The portal has been difficult to use/download from in my experience for this year that does not justify the expense as the forms were not in a fillable format requiring the addition of a massive amount of text boxes within PDFs to input information - I gave up after multiple attempts/sessions. Though I hope to work with you again, I am filing independently this year as the workload is quite similar. 

I would strongly recommend fillable PDFs for your clients as this would rapidly improve experience/usability and hope we can work together in the future as I have loved working with you in previous years.

Have a lovely day and I hope all is well for you and yours.

-- 

Best Regards,

This is the first client that we've lost due to non-fillable organizers, but far from the only complaint we've received. This should be pas the status of interested and reviewing it.

[ellacpa]

Yes, please have fillable tax organizers for TY 2022. I have had so many clients request this.

[DatabaseRobert]

(Fundamentally a repeat of my post of last year, now that the new version of the Organizer tool is ready.)

[NOTE: THIS POST IS A COMMERCIAL.]

[removed]

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.)

Remember to print your Organizers by checking the "PDF" box in the Lacerte dialog (this uses their built-in PDF creation driver), NOT by "changing the printer" to be your Adobe product.  The latter creates pages that do NOT look like Organizers.
  [See image, at bottom.]



Robert Kirk
LTUGtools

[CPATerri]

So Lacerte, I posted this query on Feb. 2, 2021, going on two years now and no response other than a  STATUS UPDATE (with no date attached) that says you have passed this on to your development team who are "interested."    

So how about giving some feedback to the 376 of us who so far have seen this and like this idea?  

[DatabaseRobert]

"So Lacerte, I posted this query on Feb. 2, 2021, going on two years now and no response"

Two years is a literal drop in the bucket of "ongoing requests" for Lacerte.  I have printouts from the Ctrl+L(email module within the Lacerte program) from the first half-dozen years of the new millenium (when there was still a Ctrl+L[email module within the Lacerte program]) of, literally, copy/pasting the EXACT SAME MESSAGE complaining about the EXACT SAME THING, and quoting the service ticket reference of the preceding year.

I got so tired of the canned response that, "while they value customer suggestions, it was too late in the development cycle to make any changes for that year's program," that I was saying, "Great, put this in the queue for NEXT year."

And after a couple of years of hearing THE SAME **bleep** RESPONSE, I started saying, "Great, put me in the queue for TWO years out.  You know what, go FIVE years out."

Guess what?  Most of those things I was griping about, in the early 2000's...  remain uncorrected.

.

Yeah, "two years" is NOTHING for the Lacerte Development Complaint Cycle.

.

One of the other members of the old Yahoo!Group for LTUG ("Lacerte Tax User Group") had a VBA script that let him read & output the binary data files for the Lacerte programs.  I got my hands on that in 2008 (for TY2007), and started extracting all of the detail.  (page10/wages, here are the entries, whether or not it is spouse, and so on)  The Tax Summary tells you, "Wages, 150k"...  but not WHO is earning the wages, nor whether or not they're in an employer plan, nor what the split is Client/Spouse, nor...
  Seeing the data allowed for that.

That was in calendar 2008, looking at TY2007 data.

Calendar 2018, I was reached out to by some of the developers at Lacerte who were putting together the ODBC connection, and got *AUTHORIZED* access to the tax detail.  (Which was necessary, because the hacking utility was invalidated by the updated encryption that Lacerte put on their files for TY2015.)

Ten years.  And I had been *asking* for the capability LONG before--think "starting in the 1990s"--I got access to it with Dennis' utility in 2008.

Two years is nothing.



Robert

P.S.  More may have *SEEN* it; 376 is simply the number of people who chose to VOTE for it.