What’s new in Intuit Tax Advisor

Intuit Tax Advisor is our newest offering to support customers who want to deliver tax advisory services. Intuit Tax Advisor suggests tax saving strategies for the advisor, then estimates and communicates the tax savings in client-friendly reports to help advisors  significantly increase their tax planning value and productivity.

Intuit Tax Advisor is a cloud-based offering that enables seamless updates, as we add new tax strategies and features our customers request. Since the August 2022 launch, we have added the following strategies:

• S Corporation choice of entity. One of the most requested strategies by tax advisors is the ability to estimate the self-employment tax savings realized by changing entity types from a sole proprietorship to an S corporation that pays a reasonable wage to the owner. This popular strategy is now available.
• Cost segregation study. Cost segregation study reports by engineering and/or accounting specialists to identify and reclassify personal property assets that are part of real property can result in accelerated deductions, lower taxes, and improved cash flow.
• Tax loss harvesting. Tax loss harvesting allows taxpayers to sell some long-term investments at a loss to offset capital gains and lower taxes.
• Optimize the QBI (qualified business income) deduction. When the taxable income on the return causes the QBI deduction to be limited on IRS Form 8995-A, Qualified Business Income Deduction, this strategy allows the user to modify the wage expenses and/or unadjusted basis in qualified property immediately after acquisition (UBIA) to optimize the available QBI deduction.

We have also updated some features to make Intuit Tax Advisor easier to use, including: 

• Reports. Based on customer feedback, we added more options to personalize client reports, including the ability to change the taxpayer’s name and other information on the title page, hide certain pages of the report, and rearrange the order that pages appear.
• Strategies. In response to customer requests for more transparency into the strategy calculations, we made several significant changes. We improved the usability of the strategy card with four tabs of information about the strategy, including Overview, Research & Considerations, Formulas, and Client materials. Under the 2022 strategy change value, we added a “Details” link with more information about the annual limits. Under the strategy tax savings calculation, we added a “Formula” link with details about how the savings were calculated for the specific strategy. 
• Pre-Strategy Baseline. Activity screens may now be edited completely before recalculating, and we added the ability to zero out all the fields in an activity or restore the prior year values. To provide more control, we increased the number of available fields to edit.   

We provided more onboarding resources to help customers get started with Intuit Tax Advisor, including a narrated, interactive case study to better understand how to create and navigate a tax plan. We also responded to customer requests for more education and process templates to support firms leading with tax advisory services.

As a result of these and other updates, Intuit Tax Advisor users are realizing significant time savings. Tax professionals historically reported that, on average, they spent about 2.3 hours preparing a “typical” tax plan (Tax Planning and Advisory Insights Survey, August 2021). The median time it takes users of Intuit Tax Advisor to prepare a tax plan is less than 23 minutes*, resulting in significant time savings. Those same users are, on average, identifying about $21,979 of tax savings* per tax plan. 

If you would like to learn more about the latest updates to Intuit Tax Advisor, and engage directly with the team, attend the monthly Intuit Tax Advisor: In The Know webinar. In addition, we continue to listen and respond to customer feedback. If you would like to suggest an idea or strategy, or vote on ideas from other users, let your voice be heard at the Idea Exchange.

While these are significant enhancements and strategies, we are just getting started! 

*Disclosure: Median time and projected client’s savings based on completion of a client’s TY2022 tax plan based on client’s TY2021 tax return data pulled by tax professionals from their Intuit® Lacerte® Tax or Intuit ProConnect™ Tax products. User experience may vary.