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Results show 4 companies control more than 90% of CPA tax preparer market.
Get a group of CPA tax preparers together, especially while their memories of tax season are fresh, and their talk soon will turn to their tax preparation software and how it might have made the ordeal easier. So the JofA and The Tax Adviser are thankful to the thousands of AICPA member tax preparers each year who similarly but on a large scale "talk shop" through this survey. This year, to be exact, 3,851 of them returned a response indicating they prepared 2015 tax returns for a fee.
PRODUCTS COVERED AND PROFILE OF RESPONDENTS
Eight of the 15 software products the survey named had significant numbers of users, in proportions that have shown only temporary fluctuations in recent years: UltraTax CS, a Thomson Reuters product (23% of respondents); CCH s ProSystem 6c (21%); Lacerte, by Intuit (17%); ProSeries, also by Intuit (12%); Drake Software's Drake Tax Software (11%); CCH Small Firm Services offering ATX (5%); CCH Axcess Tax (2.5%); and GoSystem Tax RS, another Thomson Reuters product (2%). Thus, four companies continue to effectively dominate the CPA tax software market, as reflected by the survey. Other products of the 15 were each used by less than 2% of respondents and are not included in the tables accompanying this article. Use of Lacerte was down slightly from 20% in 2015. Shares of the rest were within a couple of percentage points from the 2015 survey, with UltraTax CS and CCH Axcess Tax slightly higher than last year and ATX, Drake, and ProSeries slightly lower.
Choice of tax software tends to correlate with the size of the respondent's firm, and the respondents skewed slightly toward midsize firms from sole practitioners this year, which might account in part for an increase in share of products that are more likely to be used by midsize and larger firms. This year, sole practitioners were 30% of respondents, compared with 36% last year. Thirtysix percent were in firms of between two and five preparers (same as last year), and 22% in firms of six to 20 (up from 19% in 2015). As previously, 7% worked in firms of between 21 and 100 preparers, and less than 4%...