gianni1212 Posted February 6, 2013 Report Share Posted February 6, 2013 I know this forum is more of a place for us to help one another and not to vent, but I would really like to share my experience to know if I am the only one who has lost a lot of money due to this years program troubles. This is the 5th time that my program has frozen in the middle of a client return that was unsaved. This happened twice with clients in the office and when I was reaching the end of their return and I had other clients waiting. This made clients leave the office and embarrased me by making me explain to my clients that my computer froze and I had to prepare their return again. I just reached the end of a return that took me an hour to prepare and I have to do it again because my program froze. I try to save often but this also takes a lot of time. Monday and Tuesday I was in office until 12 pm and I attribute this to ATX problems. I will probably lose at lease 10,000 dollars in wasted time and lost clients due to ATX horrible program issues. The worst part is that last year was my first year with ATX and for me it was the best program that I had ever purchased. I became a HUGE fan of ATX's excellent system and now, if I had the time to document all of the many problems that their software has caused me this year I would sue the company to recuperate the money that I have lost due to their incompetence. We accountants have enough competition from Turbotax to worry about and we shouldn't have to worry about our software which we pay thousands of dollars for making us lose money. Turbotax makes it so easy for people to prepare their returns at home and we have to compete with that, and ATX just gave a few of my clients more reason to prepare their returns at home. At minimum I would really like to request a refund of my money for the ATX program this year. Am I being unreasonable here or does anyone support my opinions or have similar experiences? Once again, sorry for using forum to vent, but I really think that I am not alone in my experiences. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ILLMAS Posted February 6, 2013 Report Share Posted February 6, 2013 Yuuup!! Like the guy from storage wars says. http://youtu.be/69SaPppa9jI 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ljwalters Posted February 6, 2013 Report Share Posted February 6, 2013 Your not alone. Last week I had a New Client and preparing the return was slow but worked. PRINTING on the other hand took over an hour just for clients copy. (simple return not large). I was finally able to send her on her was with just her copy and printing the signature forms. I have not printed my copy yet. This made my next client wait needlessly with his two children that still needed dinner. They both gat a large discount for their inconvience. So yes many of us are loosing money. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FedupCPA Posted February 6, 2013 Report Share Posted February 6, 2013 Yes, I have lost many hours of productivity in dealing with the problems. Fortunately, I am a CPA office and we do not send clients on their way with their return, we do some input while they are here, and then review and process later, so I have not lost clients. But,....when I want to switch to a form and it takes a minute or so to pull up the form that is already in the return, or print out an 8879, which takes 5 minutes, it is not a real confidence builder in my clients that my staff or I are at the mercy of this software. Many people have spoken about a class action lawsuit after tax season and I would seriously entertain the idea if some serious compensation isn't offered. I remember a few years ago we had problems (may have been the year they outsourced tech support to India, but cannot remember), they sent me a voucher for a trip to somewhere in the Caribbean, but I had to pay the airfare....wow. So essentially they wanted me to spend money to give me something, I live in Washington State so not a cheap trip to get there. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RitaB Posted February 6, 2013 Report Share Posted February 6, 2013 I don't prepare returns while the clients wait, so they don't know about my "challenges" yet. They will start calling soon to see if I forgot about them. My tax return income YTD is 29% what it was at this point last year. The returns are here, stacked up, and waiting. Oh, and pity the fool who doesn't have everything just right when she clicks "Create e-file". 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HV Ken Posted February 6, 2013 Report Share Posted February 6, 2013 Yes, I have lost many hours of productivity in dealing with the problems. Fortunately, I am a CPA office and we do not send clients on their way with their return, we do some input while they are here, and then review and process later, so I have not lost clients. But,....when I want to switch to a form and it takes a minute or so to pull up the form that is already in the return, or print out an 8879, which takes 5 minutes, it is not a real confidence builder in my clients that my staff or I are at the mercy of this software. Many people have spoken about a class action lawsuit after tax season and I would seriously entertain the idea if some serious compensation isn't offered. I remember a few years ago we had problems (may have been the year they outsourced tech support to India, but cannot remember), they sent me a voucher for a trip to somewhere in the Caribbean, but I had to pay the airfare....wow. So essentially they wanted me to spend money to give me something, I live in Washington State so not a cheap trip to get there. I figure at my billing rate I have lost more already then the cost of the program. This has been such a disappointment for me, as I have been a huge fan of ATX since the mid 1990s. I have been wondering about compensation for this disaster as well. Guess we'll see where this all goes.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rfassett Posted February 6, 2013 Report Share Posted February 6, 2013 I have my preferences set to auto save the return every ten minutes. I can get a lot of work done in 10 minutes. Not saving for longer than that would create a real mess. I have 32 in house to do, 37 completed, with an average of 14 per day to arrive between now and March 22. Anything arriving after March 22 is automatically extended. And all of my returns are pre-scheduled in December that is how I know I will have 14 arriving per day. Not one of those are prepared in front of the client. None the less, I can not afford to give away more than 10 minutes of work, that is why I auto-save. I was just in a rather large return, was working with the fixed assets (an automobile allocation to be exact) when the software shut down. I opened it back up back track to the last auto-save, and within five minutes I was back live. Over the years, auto-save has saved me a lot of time. Yes, it bogs down the return for a few seconds while it is saving, but I never have to re-build a whole return. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HV Ken Posted February 6, 2013 Report Share Posted February 6, 2013 I have my preferences set to auto save the return every ten minutes. I can get a lot of work done in 10 minutes. Not saving for longer than that would create a real mess. I have 32 in house to do, 37 completed, with an average of 14 per day to arrive between now and March 22. Anything arriving after March 22 is automatically extended. And all of my returns are pre-scheduled in December that is how I know I will have 14 arriving per day. Not one of those are prepared in front of the client. None the less, I can not afford to give away more than 10 minutes of work, that is why I auto-save. I was just in a rather large return, was working with the fixed assets (an automobile allocation to be exact) when the software shut down. I opened it back up back track to the last auto-save, and within five minutes I was back live. Over the years, auto-save has saved me a lot of time. Yes, it bogs down the return for a few seconds while it is saving, but I never have to re-build a whole return. My autosave is set to 5 mins! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RitaB Posted February 6, 2013 Report Share Posted February 6, 2013 I also use auto-save. I have it set on five minutes, too. Actually, I think that's the default. At least when it crashes everything is still there. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jack from Ohio Posted February 6, 2013 Report Share Posted February 6, 2013 I have not lost any clients. All have been very understanding because I am the reason they do business with me. I am changing my autosave to the lowest number available. I can import a whole lot of stock transactions and type a bunch in 5 minutes. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rfassett Posted February 6, 2013 Report Share Posted February 6, 2013 Auto save does not not prevent manual save. If I sense I have done a lot of work in 5 minutes that I do not want to do again, or after every significant import, I just click save and move on. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Janitor Bob Posted February 6, 2013 Report Share Posted February 6, 2013 I lick things Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mcb39 Posted February 6, 2013 Report Share Posted February 6, 2013 I don't prepare returns while the clients wait, so they don't know about my "challenges" yet. They will start calling soon to see if I forgot about them. My tax return income YTD is 29% what it was at this point last year. The returns are here, stacked up, and waiting. Oh, and pity the fool who doesn't have everything just right when she clicks "Create e-file". I never file a return when the client is present except in about two circumstances. It makes me too nervous and it is just too easy to miss something. After my first crash this morning I am afraid to go back into the program. It is like playing cards with half a deck. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gianni1212 Posted February 6, 2013 Author Report Share Posted February 6, 2013 I have not lost any clients. All have been very understanding because I am the reason they do business with me. I am changing my autosave to the lowest number available. I can import a whole lot of stock transactions and type a bunch in 5 minutes. i'm sure your clients do business with you because they want their returns prepared and not really because of you. I have over 3500 clients and its because i know what i'm doing and take care of them. Yes im sure they do like me, but i'm not going to fool myself into thinking that they are sitting around all year waiting for tax season to come around so that they can do business with me and they won't care how long they have to wait. Time is money for my clients as well as me so i am sure that they won't like to lose money to do business with me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gianni1212 Posted February 6, 2013 Author Report Share Posted February 6, 2013 I never file a return when the client is present except in about two circumstances. It makes me too nervous and it is just too easy to miss something. After my first crash this morning I am afraid to go back into the program. It is like playing cards with half a deck. i don't like to file with people around either.....only do it when people come from really far..dont like to ask them to come back again....thinking of discontinuing this practice. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
joanmcq Posted February 7, 2013 Report Share Posted February 7, 2013 I didn't even file my 'one w2 clients while they waited this year. They've been my test returns. I only did one that way anyhow in the past. I prefer to work at night too. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chowdahead Posted February 7, 2013 Report Share Posted February 7, 2013 Who in the world would run this year's program without Auto-Save enabled? There are two things I did 10 days ago to help mitigate the 20 crashes a day I was experiencing. Set Auto-Save to 5 minutes. I would set it to every minute if I could! I wish it would Auto-Save upon each keystroke like Google Docs!Disable Auto-Update at start-up. I was starting the program so much due to crashes in the middle of returns that I had to disable this feature so speed the reboot process up! And it's hard to judge if business is lower than the same time last year due to the late e-filing start date. Plus, many people held on to their docs because they assumed they couldn't file before Jan 30th, so they didn't even visit their preparer. Plus many rental property owners cannot file yet due to no being able to calculate depreciation. Plus I have some students holding out for the availability of the 8863. Should all even out in the end (hopefully). But I also agree that if ATX doesn't offer some sort of compensation for this debacle I will be switching to another program, even if it costs me double. Honestly, if I had to pay twice what I paid for ATX I'd pay it to not suffer the stress I have suffered this year. I think I aged a year in a single weekend! Plus I'd be interesting in a class action, however, I can only imagine it would be difficult to quantify damages over such a large group. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JohnH Posted February 7, 2013 Report Share Posted February 7, 2013 I vote for not doing the return with the client present. Would never do that under any circumstances. I encourage them to mail info or drop it off after hours. I do everything possible to keep my clients out of my office so I can get some work done. There's an added benefit if you're having software problems - nobody knows but you. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thehoss813 Posted February 7, 2013 Report Share Posted February 7, 2013 I have had sooo many issues with this software this year. First the 1040 form would not open from day 1. It took 10 hours of wait time over a week for ' support' to fix it. I finished a return this morning that took one hour to complete and when I went to the IL efile info page the program froze and I lost all of the info. My client is a long timer and had to go to work so she just left her papers and told me to finish it when I can. That was not the first time that this happened this year. I am soo disappointed in this software this year. I have been using ATX for the last 9 years and was very satisfied with this product until now. Customer service is a nightmare with the press 1 debacle. Now my paperlessplus is not opening at all and it is just ruining my business.I have lost at least 10 clients because of the 1040 not opening mess. This is horrible. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
joanmcq Posted February 7, 2013 Report Share Posted February 7, 2013 If clients come from afar, I offer to mail the returns to them, or send them through my portal as PDFs. I do a lot of remote work; sometimes the clients only come in to pick up because they've already sent everything through the portal. And I don't have to deal with a lot of original docs either. Win/Win. Some clients are so remote, I've never seen them! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ATS Posted February 7, 2013 Report Share Posted February 7, 2013 My autosave is set to 5 mins! can I autosave my like button on you. lol anyhow, how do you autosave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jklcpa Posted February 7, 2013 Report Share Posted February 7, 2013 anyhow, how do you autosave In Preferences, click the 6th item down, "Open Return". Check the box to turn on the autosave feature. The most frequent autosave setting is for every 5 minutes for an open return. Click Apply to save any changes you've made to preference settings. You can click the on the Save function any time you want in addition to the autosave feature. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mcb39 Posted February 8, 2013 Report Share Posted February 8, 2013 If clients come from afar, I offer to mail the returns to them, or send them through my portal as PDFs. I do a lot of remote work; sometimes the clients only come in to pick up because they've already sent everything through the portal. And I don't have to deal with a lot of original docs either. Win/Win. Some clients are so remote, I've never seen them! I have clients that I have not seen in years. I also have clients that I have never met. Finally saw a picture of an Ala client the other day when his parents came in with their return. Even many local clients mail their info, I fax them the 8879; they fax it back signed and I mail them the finished return. Yes, those are really Win/Win.; as long as they send the check. I also have a locked drop box just outside my office door. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
joanmcq Posted February 8, 2013 Report Share Posted February 8, 2013 I use my mailbox; it locks and is outside the gate, so my dogs aren't a problem. I love the client portal-docs are already scanned too! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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