Intuit Lacerte is an Income Tax Compliance system, providing forms, tax planning support, as well as document management and document storage.
$400
Intuit TurboTax
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Intuit now offers and supports TurboTax, a tax preparation and filing service for individuals and small businesses available online, or installed via CD and download (Windows, Mac).
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!
Intuit TurboTax is well suited for most scenarios ranging from simple filing (i.e., single filing, one employer, limited asset, same state as employer) to complicated filing (i.e., married filing jointly, changing employers, different state as employers or WFH, multiple assets such as real estate and cryptocurrencies, entrepreneurship side-gig). TurboTax does not have wide-range offerings and partnerships with crypto exchanges so crypto owners may use a different service to generate the necessary tax forms for TurboTax to digest.
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!
We select TurboTax for its wide user base (familiarity), price points (multiple offerings based on users' needs), user experience (intuitiveness), technology (adaptive to user tax situations and simplify user data entry by means of upload feature), customer support (for implementer and end-users) and expert support (i.e., CPA), cloud capability, safety and security. Other products also offer several features like those but not to the same level of comprehensiveness and sophistication.
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.
