Content area
Full text
Product ratings gain, but vendor support slips.
Although AICPA tax practitioners rated this year's crop of tax-preparation software superior to the products they used last year, they gave lower grades to vendors' technical support. But for many tax practitioners, the bigger story was that the number of tax-software products continued to decline, forcing newly orphaned customers to go through the agony of selecting a new package and converting their client tax files to make them compatible. Such were the highlights of the Journal of Accountancy's spring 2004 survey of 2,010 AICFA tax-department members.
The average satisfaction rating for the nine professional products included in the survey was 4.09-out of a possible 5.00-up from last year's average of 3.61, with Intuits Lacerte posting the highest overall ratings with a score of 4.43 (see exhibit 2, page 72). Three products tied for third place with a score of 4.35: Drake Software, Thomson CreativeSolutions' UltraTax and CCH Tax and Accounting's ProSystem fx Tax.
The average cumulative rating for technical support slipped sharply to 2.44 from 3.50 last year, although respondents reported an improvement in the way their software ran on their networks-4.09, up from 3.50.
For a list of the vendors included in the survey, see exhibit 1, below.
SHRINKING MARKET
The survey also revealed that not only is the field of vendors dwindling, but the existing market is becoming more concentrated, with four products appearing to lead the field with the most customers: Intuits Lacerte and ProSeries, CCH's ProSystem JSc Tax and Thomson Creative Solutions' UltraTax.
Evidence of the growing concentration can be deduced from the data in exhibit 2. Although more than twice as many tax practitioners responded this year than last (2,010 vs. 993), making the 2004 data more statistically reliable, only nine products received the 10 or more responses needed to qualify for inclusion in the survey. That's down from 12 last year.
In addition, tax year 2004 will see at least three fewer tax software products on the market. Thomson Creative Solutions, which owns UltraTax and RIA's GoSystem Tax RS, acquired the customer lists of Tax Relief and Exact Tax, both of which withdrew from the market. Also, Best Software sold its CPA Software Visual Tax customer list to CCH, which will...