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IMO, changing software should only be done as a necessity (i.e. the program being discontinued) unless you are prepared to put in a large amount of work. Drake just looked around and saw what others were charging for what they offered. A robust program is going to be fairly pricey but you'll need it for recreating returns and when you get into the weeds. Less expensive (like OLT) will work great for 85-90% of your clients but...the other 10-15% are probably your best paying clients. I also found when I tried them that they don't reproduce returns from other programs, just creates a basic framework with name, social, etc.

Changing to Sigma Tax Pro to save $400 isn't worth it to me. I can make that up with one tax return.

Amen; I hated cleaning up Turbotax returns with a passion. And I inherited one client who only wanted me to review his work in Turbotax for a nominal fee--I did it once (the 1116 was a total mess) and when he came back next year I doubled the price. Thankfully that was the last I saw of him. But funny how proud he was of his work, I think he just wanted me to congratulate him.

Back in the day, I worked for an Accountant who used Turbo Tax big floppy disks. She had to pay extra for every single module. Efiling was barely heard of. We printed and printed and assembled and assembled. Once I started my own business and graduated (by force) to Sabre; I introduced her to the ATX products and she embraced the (Everything for the price of one). She happily continued with Max until she retired. We often question why people are willing to pay almost as much for Turbo Tax as we would charge them for a professional return. Sometimes we end up cleaning up the messes that they create. I have never gained a client by advertising. 276 returns for a small, in-home office isn't bad for "word of mouth" growth. Integrity and personal interest will win out every time and I sleep very well at night.

I won't purchase anything from Intuit - I do hear that their Pro Series is good, but their TurboTax product overtly tries to put us out of business. Their advertisements really irk me - one of them shows a guy with a briefcase and the impact of the ad is that if you buy their product, you will be just as good as a CPA. For years they also advertised "free, free, free" which was a blatant lie, and I think they finally had to stop. There are no telling how many people buy Turbotax to avoid paying for a real professional, and forego the service we can render to them.

I have been with Drake for years and years, but a couple years ago, Phil Drake cashed in his chips and sold the business. Since then, there have been changes, most prodigious change is a whopping price increase. A recent post from another member advised simply to cover software increases with our fee structure next year, e. g. changing to an unknown product is risky. Good advice, but I am going to look around if their are other recommendations. I will need invidual returns, all entity returns, and all state returns that work. Years ago I had TaxSlayer, which had excellent, excellent customer services, but was weak on state returns once you left SCarolina and Georgia. If there is nothing better to look at, I might be best advised to take the gentleman's advise - don't risk changing and build the increase into next year's fee structure.

Or, your client's Congressperson.

Perhaps you should try the Taxpayer Advocate Service https://www.irs.gov/advocate/the-taxpayer-advocate-service-is-your-voice-at-the-irs

Like others in our community I have received my annual renewal notice and I too have wondered what is the rush? In looking around I find that some other providers are coming out with product that is cost competitive with ATX and has features from the perspective of a small time tax guy like me that bear close scrutiny such as unlimited efiles as opposed to ATX's upper limit of 75 and then they tack on an additional fee which becomes not insubstantial to your total cost. Now that the pressure is subsiding I am going to take a close look before pulling the renewal switch this year.

Encyro has served us well for a few years now. Easy for clients to use, which is great. Do not have to deal with calls asking "How do I use it", And they offer "Digital Signing" of documents. Very low fee for signatures !!! Pennies per. https://www.encyro.com/ Link to their digital signature info (8879 KBA) https://www.encyro.com/esign

Hello all, We've had some (very few, but more than zero) issues where database tables have crashed during times of heavy load on the server. These load spikes are usually related to other sites that I'm responsible for that happen to share resources with the ATX Community. These haven't been significant issues, and in fact have been very easy to resolve when they arise, but it does cause brief downtime on the Forum. So, in the interest of constant improvement, I would like to move the ATX Community to its own server (VPS) with its own dedicated resources. There are other server configuration changes/challenges that I'll tackle at the same time. Because this is the only forum I maintain, I am less experienced with performance tuning for this software than, say, more standard website content management systems. All that to say, I am expecting it to be a slightly bumpy transition but with improved speed and stability in the long term. There might be as much as one or two days of downtime followed by intermittent hiccups until everything is smoothed out. I'm aiming for mid-May to get this work done, but there is no hurry on my end. If there are business reasons to put it off longer, please speak up! Thanks!

I'm in the never ending merry-go-round with the IRS. Client had a fraudulant 2020 return filed mere days after she passed away. We didn't know at the time, but when we went to file the returns 2020 & 2021 rtn (yes, 2020 was late) in Sept 2022, obviously it was discovered a few months later when the refunds weren't issued. I have been through ID verification 7 times for the 2020 & 2021 returns. I finally got the 2021 refund, but 2020 (the return that actually had fraud) still, 1.5 years later is in limbo. Strangely I got another letter that they needed me to ID verify 2021 again and soon after a copy of the cleint's tax transcript for 2020 that said I requested it, but I didn't. Of course, I have called the ID verification number at least 50 times, and it says, you "due to high call volume, we cannot take your call at this time." Adding insult to injury, the main IRS reps cannot field any calls regarding the still outstanding 2020 refund until I ID verification, for the 8th time, has been completed. And the true cherry on top. They said processing after ID verification is taking upwards of 650 days!! (This is much worse than the 430 days number I got 6 months ago.) WTH. I don't even know who to go to for help. Can't the gov't be held accountable in some way for this nightmare of disorganization. It has got to be criminal the way the IRS is being managed these days.

I cannot customize my reports anymore in QBO. I went to the little gear icon and the boxes that you need to customize the report are not there anymore. So I get on QBO chat support and after 30 minutes, the chat "expert" ended the session after only verifying my account. Who do you think has worse customer support? IRS or QBO? Any QBO experts out there who know what I am talking about and know how to fix it? Thanks Tom Longview, TX

Intuit's CEO has openly said that they plan to expand to take 25 % of the small business accounting/payroll/tax market. I wonder if cutting services to boost profits will help them