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As for depreciation, I will have to agree that it is quite rustic in form, and difficult to generate reports. I would like to see assets separated by schedule/activity rather than grouped all into one basket for the tax payer. Retrieving the reports outside of the return from the "home" screen is also rather odd. It's not perfect, but it will most likely see improvement with user suggestions. Drake is more likely to make improvements from the suggestion basket than you would ever see come from the CCH complaint and moan box. In the end though, depreciation works and it works well even with conversions. If you want next year's depreciation for write-up purposes for example, you can easily use the federal next year depreciation statement within the tax return.

and i'll just add as far as networking, this program will work in almost any environment you put it in, I 've ran it on Windows 7 & 8, Windows XP, Windows 2003 as well as Citrix Metaframe. The reason why it works is simple, it's not designed to restrict you to licenses and copy protection or use microsoft developer libraries. Therefore, it just works. Simple. They should change the name of the software to Simply Drake, or Drake Simple. At one of the seminars I attended, there was a lady in her 50th tax season and had left ATX for Drake, she was happy with support and was adapting to the software, if she can so can you.

We have left ATX after the obvious reasons in 2012 mid-season and are completing our extensions in Drake 2012. We have also used prior year Drake software for older returns since they give you access to the software. We have 4-5 people using it at the same time, 800+ returns on the list and I can simply say that after using the program for a week or two, not only does it make more sense but it performs at an entirely new level. The company recognizes that firms cannot afford to spend 10-20 grand each tax season to make software run and still supports Windows 98 clients. What this means to our firm running a 2003 Terminal server with dual quad xeons and 8 gb of ram? Instantaneous results. I can open the program and be the return in under 2 seconds. This program is designed by tax practitioners, not college grad programmers filled with .net and xhtml who waste hundreds of meg of ram to do a simple tax return. A fairly complex individual return loaded in Drake takes 8 mb of system ram, not 1.2 gb like in ATX. While Drake is not eye-candied as we were spoiled with ATX, I can do a return in Drake in under 3 minutes that would take 15-20 in ATX. You just have to get acclimated to the structure of the program. It is hardcore streamlined and designed to do what it's suppose to do, complete a tax return. The only thing from ATX we will miss the the payroll compliance portion, mostly because of the state forms. Also, conversion is lightening fast. I converted 800 returns fully and were usable from ATX 2011 to Drake 2012 in under 12 minutes. Any questions I've ever had, i can resolve with Drake on the phone in just a few minutes. Looking forward to a full tax season next year with Drake.

hehee yeah, or start sending client's sales pitches that intuit will do their taxes for less than your tax preparer. much like quickbooks does to payroll customers. What a way to treat "pro-advisors", recommend their product and have them under-cut you in every point of your business.

AMEN to that.. lol preaching to the choir now lol. Just to make them happy and install ATX in "their world". I have a dual quad xeon 2.66ghz 8-146GB SAS 15k RAID with 32 GB of ram wasting away to host data for lonely little workstations. If i dare transmit an efile from a workstation it never updates the status from "created" to "transmitted", even though the history shows it and will eventually update it once accepted. Program sucks.. pure plain and simple. To think that the entire branch of CCH still have jobs is absurd at this point. The CEO needs to be immediately pink slipped. Not to mention that leaving the program open , opening and closing returns hangs about 100 mb of memory until the program grows to like 1.5 GB and then crashes. SMOOTH MOVE.

lol umm yeah.. intuit.. enough said with that one. Pro Series, for the professional tax preparer who does unlimited 1040s but "limited" business returns. Since when did tax professionals do just a few business returns? lol

This is awesome! lol I install the program as it was "designed" to be in a server data hosting and workstation laboring environment and it sucks even more. Our equipment my A$$. Plus what idiot thought it was a good idea to make us have to "attach pdf" to an efile? It takes over a minute just to open the freaking print menu and then a few more minutes to create the e-file. Simply unacceptable and for those "a re-write was necessary" crowds, are you serious? Happy with what you have? A program that eats 1.2 GB of system memory to open up a freaking return? IT IS A TAX RETURN!!!!!! Not tracking meteors here.

Would have been nice for them to be a little more upfront about changing something that many have used in the past. How exactly did you get in touch with technical support anyway? I have been on hold for over 2 hours to never hear anything. Not to mention email support tickets over 3 weeks now with no response. They had something that worked very well and changed it for something that obviously was not as good. Support it as you wish but you cannot justify the performance decrease and excessive hardware requirements to do what in the end is a completed tax return. You can do the same thing in a fraction of the time and hardware required in any prior version. If the program was designed properly, then terminal services would not even be an issue. That is only an excuse for poorly written software.

but you are talking about loading the loader exe from individual workstations in a client-server environment. I'm talking about running ATX in a true-multiuser environment as in a terminal server/remote desktop server. As in one server, users log into the server via remote desktop connection mstsc.exe and all work directly from the server. This way, you no longer are bound by the processor limitations of your workstations and utilize the true power of your dedicated server. This is why prior versions of ATX i can open the program for the first time, open any return i want in under 25 secs. There is no need to trasnmit data between the workstation and server which decreases performance and increases network traffic. The data will never leave the server and the workstation access no files from the server. It is virtually the same thing as every user sitting at the server working at the same time. The program is not allowing multiple instances of the atx.loader.exe file. That is the problem. You won't get multiple instances of the loader in memory if each individual workstation is running the program.

no, he is talking about two or more users using the application from the same station I believe. The exe loader now can only be in use in memory on one workstation at a time, unlike the initial release of the 2012 program and all prior versions. 6 workstations accessing a central "server" hosting the data is fine, but very slow compared to how is "could" be if they had taken anytime to develop this product.

It's their installation program not correctly making changes to your local registry. This is funny actually because to install it on a workstation, I had to disable anti-virus, make sure i had opened and closed ATX on the "server", not be in the program anywhere and then run the netsetup from the UNC name, not a mapped network drive. //server/atx2012/ect.... using the mapped drive seemed to cause me more trouble than anything. It installed ATX like it was what you said in fact, a single user local copy.

No, sorry, ATX 2012 is the culprit. It is a poorly designed, thrown-together piece of crap that wouldn't run on a Cray efficiently. Look at any previous release of ATX, even the "Payroll Compliance Software 2012" which uses the old ATX database or look at any other rival product. You cannot justify that sort of performance increase and yet have NOTHING better to show for it. Total lack of professional due care.

They should be paying us for every hour lost by their ignorance and lack of care programming. Not to mention begging us to still give them a dime next year. I'm actually surprised that a joint suit hasn't begun talks among their customer base whose businesses have been derailed by their lack of competence.

Welcome to the club. For 11 years we have used ATX on a terminal server, though they don't claim to support it, but it always worked until they switched to the crappy Raven database this year. The first initial install of the program up to the 12.7 version works multi-user in terminal server. However I could not install the 12.8 or 12.9 patch on my server without rendering the program useless. On another test server, once 12.8 goes on, it seems to change a registry key that makes the program look for other running instances. Once that happens even after uninstalling and deleting every file installed still I get that same message even at the initial install. So in a nutshell they have shut the door on use multi-users who use terminal services. A stupid careless move that will cost them many customers. To e-file I have to export the 4562 held returns over to a function machine with 12.8 running just to e-file. Even in their ideal installation environment, the program sucks and is unstable. Next year's release should be absolutely at no charge to the many thousands of customers who they have basically destroyed their business this year. If they are not going to allow multi-user environments another company will have our business next year, we will not waste resources on using their software like it's 1995. Total lack of any due care during development. Did you notice the tech's blog at ATX? He mentions it taking 2 hours for QA to approve and release the update? What type of testing is that? I could barely open the program and look at 10 returns in that short length of time.

oh i just love how you have to have 12.8 to e-file the 4562. that means somebody messed up even more than we could ever have had imagined. now if i could just get the #@@# thing to run 12.8 i would be limping along still.