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. 

[DatabaseRobert]

(NOTE THAT THIS POST IS A COMMERCIAL!)

[removed] 

David has done a good bit of updating for the instructions and interaction with Adobe so that it less arcane.  We retained the "Action" capability so you can point it at a folder-full of files and have it process a bunch sequentially.

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

[DatabaseRobert]

David has told me that several people have given him feedback about difficulty with the discount codes.  To simplify things, he has also created "iTax2023" (four letters, only the 'T' is capitalized, four digits) for use by readers here.

In addition, if you tried using the previous code and were unable to get it to work, please reach him at "email <at> PDFautomationstation.com" and he will refund you the 20% discount.

Sorry if you had any difficulties!

Robert Kirk
LTUGtools

[CPATerri]

Hey Intuit, are you there?  I posted this request in Feb. 2021, we are going on THREE years now that it's been "under review."  For what we pay for your product I expected more than "under review" for three years. Are you going to implement this?  If not, we can all move on from it in one way or another.  

[Helpmate]

So what is the new verdict now?

[MARILYNKR]

I have used the e-organizer for years but this year about half of my clients did not receive them so I sent them again.  They still did not receive them

Their appointments were included with them so that was also a problem.

Makes me look incompetent!

[PA7539]

Great suggestion. Still waiting for action 3+ years later.

[CPATerri]

How much longer will this be under review, coming upon 4 years now....and what is your definition, Lacerte, of a holistic approach?

[GITAX]

No longer holding my breath.

[ra2]

I don't think Intuit is interested in updating Lacerte except in very limited ways. We go back to 1992, and have seen very little in terms of product development since Intuit bought the product from Lacerte about 20 years ago.  My guess is you'll never see form-fillable organizers.  In fact, I don't believe anyone at Intuit even reads these community forums.  As far as I can tell, this forum exists just to give us the illusion that they care.

[tom5]

To All Frustrated Lacerte Users on this Forum:

I’ve been harping about this for years on this forum, and there’s been no action taken.

There’s probably a good chance, if Intuit is watching, that they won’t do anything radical because the bulk of the Lacerte accountants are change-adverse.  No change means no improvement.  Their Administrative function has always been archaic.  No improvements on the text processing feature for attaching notes to the return in the last 40 years since I’ve been a user.  Pagination is still janky on the custom letter feature and has never been fixed. 

We see many Lacerte tax returns in our bookkeeping practice, and many don’t even go as far as customizing the opening salutation from “Dear Client” on the cover letter or filing instructions. 

Tech support told me a few years ago that the most frequent issue reported is that the users have the caps lock key engaged, so that’s why they can’t log in to their program.  That’s how backwards the bulk of Lacerte users are. 

Perhaps Lacerte doesn’t want to upset their users, since their defection rate is greater than their acquisition rate, mostly because of their REP pricing is too high, and next, because of their shoddy tech support gets worse every year. 

This could mean that the whole tax prep community will go down the tubes with Lacerte to obsolescence as the disrupters take over with AI and put us all out of business.  None of the other major players are doing much in the way of modernization either, so the whole bunch of us lemmings will go over the cliff together. 

Drake is impossible to use, but has the greatest market share, about 40%, because it’s the cheapest on the market, irrespective of the fact that it’s the least efficient major program available.  Staff works harder and longer with Drake, but practice owners must be myopic about it, probably because it’s so cheap.  Poor economy and backwards business decisions plague most tax practitioners who are struggling with pricing pressure from price-driven, commodity-oriented tax clients.   

One thing still favorable about paper organizers is that they’re low tech, and clients can write on them all over the pages and margins with notes, albeit some of them have illegible handwriting.  In those cases, I ask the client to resubmit, politely, of course. 

There’s hardly anything about a pencil that can go wrong, and it’s easy to use.  Plus, they come with erasers.  Brilliant!

Tom Kalajian, CRTP

Provident Professional Services, Inc.

Lake Forest, CA