Hi all, great community you have here. I came across the forum while researching tax software (renewal time).
I've used Drake for the past couple of years. I generally find it okay, but I'm wondering if making the move to ATX makes sense for me. I'm drawn to ATX partially because I had many years using Prosystem and grew to appreciate many of the bells and whistles, especially after switching to Drake. I'm a solo shop. I'm at around 55 tax returns. 90% are 1065s and the rest are 1120-S, 1040 and 990.
Here are some of the issues I have with Drake.
Prosystem was much more robust in excel import/export functionality. This saved a lot of time/effort importing massive amounts of data (partner info and fixed assets for me)
Prosystem could print off K-1 package PDFs for each of the partners and even add password protection to each file. I have to manually print to PDF and add the partner's name to the filename. This is tedious for some of my returns that have 100+ partners.
Drake cannot calculate depreciation correctly for short-year returns. Weird that they can't get this right.
If you have multiple activities of the same type (e.g. multiple rental properties), you cannot specially allocate to partners per activity (I.e. 50/50 split for property A, but 75/25 for property B.)
Some small stuff that I don't think I would ever see in Prosystem would get overlooked in Drake. For example, when entertainment expense was no longer deductible, Drake would still add 50% Meals and Entertainment to the statement page instead of stating just 50% Meals
Can't e-file superseded returns.
Would ATX be more efficient in any of these areas? Or would I just be trading in some limitations for other limitations? The price differences aren't significant for me. The support for Drake was good, but I rarely used it.
Many on this forum seem to have switched from ATX to Drake, so I'd appreciate any insight from those who've used both.