Canopy is tax practice management software from Canopy, Inc., with accounting functionality designed for tax professionals and their customers. It includes tax resolution analytics, automatic IRS form population, client management, transcript delivery and reporting, custom service workflows, penalty abatement, casework/client engagement tracking, client portals, and billing and invoicing capabilities.
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Intuit Lacerte
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Intuit Lacerte is an Income Tax Compliance system, providing forms, tax planning support, as well as document management and document storage.
If you want to have an all in one solution for managing you clients (from sales lead to loyal client) this is the answer. We rarely have to use other systems to take a client from a lead to completing their taxes or representation case. It's also given us the freedom to switch our business model to focus on value added pricing and shift to be an advisory focused firm. If you want to pump out hundreds of returns and don't care about managing your clients on a long term basis because you're a quantity over quality shop, you may not find value in the software.
This software is great for a tax preparer that wants the whole package from organizers to customer returns with letters and invoices. This is the best software with everything combined together. For new tax preparers looking for expensive software and are willing to some items (invoices) organizers, scheduling) through other means, Intuit Lacerte might be too expensive. But once the practice grows the time saved having all the “bells and whistles “ is worth every penny!
As TheCPATaxProblemSolver, Canopy is a great timesaver in helping me complete IRS Offer In Compromises. An Offer in Compromise (OIC) is an IRS program that allows taxpayers to settle their liabilities for less than the full amount owed.
I use analytics contained in the state-of-the-art Canopy tax resolution software to calculate smart recommendations based on each unique case to arrive at the best solution and prepare successful cases.
Canopy tax has an all in one practice management software. It features Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Document Management, Workflow Management, as well as Billing and Invoicing
Connectivity with Outlook for email tracking - the connection is sometimes lost and there is no notification. You just look for your email trail and there is nothing.
Electronic signatures for multiple contacts on one document with some fields being optional would be a great help.
Being able to see contact transcripts in the client record view versus just the transcript screen would be more efficient.
Canopy works efficiently for all the companies, more so the CPA firms and other programs have no such advancement. The existence of an individualized client portal from Canopy is a remarkable step. Canopy records the due dates for a project and checks them when they are near or notifies the user.
I’ve heard other tax preparers talk about their software and their likes and dislikes. When I offer to show them Intuit Lacerte most are blown away by what it does. One preparer used ProConnrct online tax (also by Intuit), and she loves how easy Intuit Lacerteis to use. She said having live support (not chat) to actually be able to show issues and work through them was great. Both programs use the same calculations, but the extras (trial balance, organizers with prior year data, invoicing, scheduling, filters, etc) are what makes Intuit Lacerte the best!
Lacerte Diamond Passport fees is highly priced at 17.5K USD + fastpath additional per user. They could consider to bring down the cost so that it works out lucratively.
