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To get through the rigors of tax season, CPAs depend on their tax preparation software. Here's how they rate the leading professional products.
While professionals in all walks of life are prone to swap views on the relative merits of their tools of the trade, among CPA tax preparers, tax return preparation software generates often extensive and ardent discussion. Return preparers depend on their software to accurately apply U.S. federal and state tax laws, a highly complex procedural and computational task. So the The Tax Adviser and JojA are pleased once again to facilitate and, hopefully, distill this shop talk, with our annual survey of preparers'ratings, likes, and dislikes of their tax preparation software.
We also asked for a third year about clients' tax-related identity theft and saw, for the second year in a row, a sharp decrease in reported incidence of this problem from the 2016 tax season, when it was reported by nearly 60% of respondents (see the sidebar "Taxpayer ID Theft Further Recedes," p. 518). And, looking ahead, we asked whether respondents had discussed with clients selected new provisions of the tax reform legislation known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), RL. 115-97, learning which were uppermost in CPAs'client communications during the 2018 tax season (see the sidebar "TCJA Provisions Discussed With Clients," p. 519).
Products covered and profile of respondents
The survey asked about 13 tax software products, and, as in previous years, seven products garnered significant numbers of responses: ATX (6% of respondents), CCH Axcess Tax (4%), and ProSystem fx (16%), all from Wolters Kluwer; Drake (14%), by Drake Software; Lacerte (17%) and ProSeries (13%), both products of Intuit Inc.; and UltraTax CS (19%), by Thomson Reuters. The remaining approximately 11% of respondents were divided among the remaining six products and write-in entries (1.2%), which are summarized in bonus material available on thetaxadviser.com (see the link at the end of "Results and Methodology"). For last years results, see "2017 Tax Software Survey," tinyurl.com/ yóumkdea.
This year, firms of five or fewer practitioners accounted for 74% of users of all products, with 17% in firms of six to 20 practitioners, nearly 6% in firms of 21 to 100, and firms of more than 100 accounting for a little...