Don in Upstate NY

You're correct. Wikipedia says between 900,000 and 1.2 million.

Let's run the numbers ... From the PTIN discussions, we know there are about 100,000 tax preparers in the US. Let's say our new start-up is sucessful and captures 10% of the market. At first TRX was offering the complete package for $300, with renewals at that price 'forever'. So our startup might have gross revenues of $3,000,000. If we had a full time staff of 15 people (management, marketing, sales, product planning, top level programming) who were willing to work for $100,000 (including benefits), we would have $1,500,000 left. Now hire 30 programmers on a half-year basis and you've spent it all. Too bad there's nothing left for overhead (building, computers, utilities) and customer support during the season. Oh, and profit.

The judge was required to decide if the IRS had the authority to regulate preparers, not if it was a good idea. The IRS gets its authority from Congress, and can't decide to add to that authority just because it would be more efficient or would prevent fraud if it did so.

I had previously posted that the capital gains worksheet didn't allow VARIOUS or INHERITED as a literal in the purchased date field. Doug responded and this was fixed in Revision 7. It's broken again - no more VARIOUS or INHERITED in Revision 10.

NY has required registration of preparers for several years now. They were to establish a committee to define the requirements, but that was never accomplished. Right now the only qualification necessary is a credit card.

I bet you the tiger (or what ever it was back when I first got the program) ate the poor little things. Course, he's been unemployed for some years now, and must be gettin' hungry ...

Rev 7 allows Various and Inherited. Thank you.

I know we generally only gripe about things, but the way TRX tells you that there is an update available when you first start the program is a nice feature. Don

Nope. The field apparently will accept only actual dates. Some field checking - month limited to 1 thru 12, day limited from 1 thru 31 - but no literals allowed. Will check again after (Friday?) update.

Maybe I just can't find the instructions, but how do you enter "VARIOUS" or "INHERITED" as the purchase date for a capital gains transaction?

Assuming you are talking about a 2011 tax return. That was the first year that basis was reported to the IRS. The 1099-B sent to the IRS would contain a basis in box 3 only if this had been a covered transaction. That would be the sale of a stock purchased in 2011. The sale of anything else would be an uncovered transaction and the basis would not have been reported to the IRS. The confusion comes in because the broker may have gratuitously reported the basis of an uncovered transaction on the 1099-B sent to the taxpayer. There is no requirement that the 1099-B sent to the taxpayer must match the 1099-B sent to the IRS. So the taxpayer looks at box 3, sees a basis and calculates a loss, while the IRS looks at box 3, sees nothing, assumes a zero basis, and calculates a gain.

Maybe board administrators can see that data, but the rest of us see the "Warning Points" line ONLY under our own profiles. Tom is obviously a special case because of his agressive looking avatar. :dunno:

More options ... Yes, Don Ham is the president of Surefire TaxWise now also has an on-line product, 1040 only, available thru him at $200 plus $5.00 per return. Drake is introducing an on-line product, but the break-even point with their full desktop product seems to be in the 70 return area.

IIRC, TaxWise, which is a cousin of ATX (both owned by CCH Small Firm Services), also requires Administrative privleges to run. I inquired about this several years ago and received the same "so what's the harm in that?" response. I think it was TaxWise that would allow you to start an update with only user rights, then abort the update mid-way through and leave you in an unrecoverable state. So if there is now a warning and graceful backout procedure, that's a feature!

We who have already paid for renewals of TRX are somewhat between a rock and a hard place. For a small practice, software price is a major concern. As far as I know, TRX/TaxExact is the lowest priced 1040 software, several hundred dollars less than the well established TaxAct. Marketing hype aside, it's unreasonible on our part to expect the lowest priced product to have all the features of the higher priced products. So unless TaxExact is totally useless, Plan A is probably to share in the growing pains of a developing product. For this year. If TaxExact doesn't perform to your satisfaction within a few weeks after the filing season actually begins, then Plan B is to switch software in the middle of the season. I've done it -- it's painful and costly (except in my case the original s/w company did refund my purchase price.) If, based on your evaluation of TaxExact to date, and your expectations of what must be done to make it acceptible, you determine that you will have to switch software after the season begins, then SWITCH NOW. All you have to lose is money, which is better than losing clients* or submitting incorrect returns to the IRS. * Edit - or losing your hair, which is N/A in my case

My Proforma Problem Identified It appears that although last years TRXPro (TaxWorks) allowed you to store your data files anywhere you wanted (e.g. on an encrypted drive or a thumb drive), the 2012 proforma function will only work if the returns were on the C: drive. If you had multiple returns for the same person in different folders (e.g. an original return and an amended one) they will both be shown on the proforma list with no way to distinguish which is which. Having the proforma list sorted by "Full Name" (meaning by first name) is somewhat useless. Thanks to Beatrice in tech support for working this out with me.

Has anyone gotten the Proforma (convert last year's returns) to work? Following the manual pages 17 thru 21 I get a blank list of returns to convert. No error messages, just no returns showing. I used TRXPro (TaxWorks) last season so my browse screen looks similiar to figure 2.9, except of course the TY10s are now TY11s. Don EA in Upstate NY

I called the 855.880.1040 phone number yesterday and got a tracking number. According to the FedEx site the package arrived in my town at 2:55am this (Friday) morning and is now on the truck for delivery today.

I would like to point out that neither the manual nor the demo indicates that the software supports the preparation of 1041 (Trust and Estate) returns. So it is certainly NOT a 100% complete replacement or functional renewal of last year's software.

What about the deposit on the bottles or cans? Time value of money and all that.

Actually of course they WERE addressed when they were first enacted (or later changed). When congress in it's wisdom decided that sales tax could not be used as an itemized deduction after December 31, 2011, they must have had a good reason to do so. Why should we demand that they change their minds now? Our country needs fiscal integrity and stability. What could be better than intending to carry out the laws that we pass?

I'm sticking with SnoPake.

Our basic arithmetic notational system has the property that expressions containing multiple components may be evaluated differently depending on the order that the components are evaluated. To eliminate this undesirable property, ordering rules have been defined. Using these conventional ordering rules, the "answer" is 20. The advent of calculators and computers complicated things by introducing different notations and default ordering rules. For example, I have three calculators on my desk. If I enter the same keystrokes " 3 X 4 + 5 = " on all three, they all give the correct answer of 17. However, if I enter " 3 + 4 X 5 = ", two of them give the incorrect answer of 35 while one gives the correct answer of 23. In general, four function and business calculators ignore ordering rules and evaluate in the order the data are presented, while scientific calculators wait until the "=" key is pressed before evaluating. It is not unusual for two calculator models from the same vendor to give different results. And no engineer of the 70'scan ever forget that one of the earliest hand held calculators (the hp-35 and sucessors) used a totally different notation (RPN - Reverse Polish Notation) " 4 5 X 3 + " If you want to delve further into this area, you can google 'math ordering rules' or start with Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia....r_of_operations

I was a Quattro user for a long time. (IIFC, Quattro was originally a Borland product that was later bought out by Word Perfect). I had developed several dozen macros and scripts to automate calculations and conversions within my financial analysis packages. When I finally converted to Excel, all of my Quattro spreadsheets would load and function correctly, except that none of my macros worked anymore. As I began the laborious task of re-writing the macros, I was delighted to find out that Excel had built-in functions that achived most of what I had to write macros for in Quattro.