Exporting & Importing in 2012 = Horrible!

[bergenco]

Customer Service (CS) was unhelpful when calling so seeing if anyone else has the same setup.

We install ATX locally in each workstation and save all the data in 1 folder in shared network drive. In the past 7 years Exporting and Importing from that 1 shared folder worked great from any workstation.

Now it seems horrible due to reasonings below:

1. Exporting to the atx file no longer saves the file as the person's last and first name.

It saves it as "Name =ABC..." with a bunch of weird strings in front of the name OR "Name = ABC..." (notice difference in spacing between "=" sign and "ABC." We have over 900 clients making it now cumbersome to locate file (example) "SMITH" - previous years we just hit 'S' on the keyboard and it would take us the general location. Now, you can't do that since they all start with either "Name = SMITH.." or "Name =SMITH.." so I have to a) look at 2 different locations due to spacing errors in the export process and look at the latest timestamp from both locations since you cannot OVERRIDE previous versions (point #2 below). Per CS you cannot change how the file name is saved when exported.

2. When exporting, you cannot override the previous file with the new one, and a new copy is made.

Now staff is forced to find the most recently timestamped file which adds extra time in opening files. To further complicate, it is hard to find the 5 SMITH files since some are named "Name =SMITH..." or NAME = SMITH..." in my folder with 900 files so not all the SMITH files will be even aligned together to see which file is the latest and greatest. Since a backup of the file is already auto saved on my C drive, I'd much prefer to OVERRIDE the previous file when exporting so I don't have 5 different versions available. Per CS you cannot change this feature.

3. Importing does not automatically open the return (like the last 7 years), but insteads puts it onto the Return Manager, where you then have to open the return.

Horrible idea since some complicated returns involve importing/opening several times throughout the busy season. Thus, the Return Manager will have several versions of the return and you may end up double clicking the previous version instead. Furthermore, since the updated version can either show up as "SMITH..." or "Copy (x) of SMITH..." on the Return Manager once imported, I must scour both the 'C' and 'S' sections of my Return Manager AND look at the coresponding time stamp. My Return Manager has over 900 files, so having 3+ copies (average) yields scouring 2,700 files just to import/open a file. To avoid all this mess why not just have the file open automatically upon improting like in the last 7 years of using ATX?

4. Agree with the other users, it is SUPER slow compared to the past versions, which magnifies all exporting/importing problems above. Get rid of all the cute graphics and leave that to the Turbo Tax crowd, not actual preparers.

This feels much more like a flimsy unfinished beta version but I want to be wrong on this, am I missing something? Advanced thanks.

[spiderweb]

I feel and share your pain but why don't you install the ATX2012 as a network install whereby you will have a central repository on the server to save to one location from all workstations. That is what will alleviate all the mentioned above issues you are having.

Rather than exporting and then importing from various machines independent of each other...