Intuit Lacerte is an Income Tax Compliance system, providing forms, tax planning support, as well as document management and document storage.
$400
Vertex
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Vertex combines tax research with technology to improve tax accuracy and
consistency on sales and purchase transactions. The automation aims to support high volume and complex transactions at speed and scale to streamline internal
processes and improve audit performance. Integrations to
ERP, e-commerce, procurement, and other billing systems enables a single tax
engine to seamlessly support a growing business. In addition to tax
determination, Vertex provides tools and services to automate and…
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!
It is easy to use, and the user interface is very interactive. A beginner can also work with ease and have no difficulty accessing Vertex. It is straightforward to understand how Vertex works. The tax calculation mechanism is good and accurate.
Vertex does a great job of building in-house industry expertise (leasing in our case) so they truly understand the tax technical and compliance obstacles we face day to day.
Vertex actively solicits for and responds to customer feedback on development and product roadmap suggestions. The Leasing users group is an example where Vertex takes an active role in communicating with and taking feedback from our industry.
Vertex tax updates are very timely and thorough, which makes the compliance process less stressful for our team.
Reporting: Vertex VAT Compliance is not fully ready to support all EU country's requirements.
Data storage.
Online reporting in VVC: many countries require to report VAT Declaration in an electronic way. This function is still missing for some of the countries from VVC.
We are satisfied with the overall performance of Vertex. The software has provided my company with many efficiencies. We have shorted our audits and found that many audits are happy that we are using Vertex to calculate our taxes. We no longer need to worry about updating our rates each month since Vertex sends us a file to upload
Great program, but a lot of features are still manual. It's difficult to set recurring monthly reports in a time frame of "Previous Month" and we have to kick them off. We have to manually delete reports, there isn't an option to choose multiple at once. Data that is transferred into Vertex returns is quirky as well, taking multiple steps to update lines of data.
Our Vertex performance is good, although we are now experiencing Error 502 when adding additional data points to our transaction tester single tests. At Exchange, I was told to reach out to support....that most likely the On Demand system needed some additional CPU resource added. I have a currently open ticket, that has not yet been fixed on this matter
I cannot speak from personal experience, but our IT staff has found contacting Vertex support staff to be challenging. One coworker has gone through several support tickets because he was an unrecognized contact. He has also expressed frustration that communication with support staff is conducted solely by email, drawing out issues over an extended length of time that could be more easily resolved by a brief phone call.
By training I'm referring to our engagement with Vertex Consulting's professional services group. Each person on the engagement had prior leasing industry tax experience and most if not all used O Series before joining Vertex. Consultants with industry specific tax experience provide so much more than just "training". They are able to engage in deep tax technical discussions with actual experience while in private practice. This coupled with having visibility to how numerous other leasing peers approach similar tax issues is a huge plus on top of the standard training.
Vertex has offered multiple webinars for the products we have purchased that are informative and helpful. I've also attended a few of the Vertex annual conferences where I was able to strength my knowledge of Vertex. I also found that their online library and videos can be helpful in resolving issues and answering questions.
The implementation is challenging, make no mistake but will provide much value over time. Make sure you have full support of IT and your major stakeholders in your company. I found that while many people claimed to understand tax was important, they had no idea how deep tax in entrenched throughout the lease life cycle.
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!
In comparison specifically with Avalara, Vertex is better in every way. It is much more customizable and allows us to change the way our tax software is set up for our business needs. Avalara is much more constricted, and is using the SST system which can allow for simplified returns, but in our case was causing more problems. Avalara is also much more expensive than Vertex, for less capabilities. Vertex' customer support is much stronger than Avalara's, as they are focused on obtaining and retaining customers whereas Avalara was continually trying to find ways to get money from us
There needs to be a time-consuming setup both in the Enterprise Resource Platform and in Vertex and the related tools as well but once this is all established, Vertex is very proficient at calculating Sales and Use Tax in the USA and in Canada with GST/HST, as well as several of the provinces where we are located. As we added plants in different jurisdictions via greenfield expansion and aquisition, Vertex was able to integrate those as long as the tax department is fully informed of the system.
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.
We use Vertex on a monthly basis to see if tax has been over-accrued or over-charged on invoices. We do save tax every month using the tool. Not at liberty to share too much more - the technology does assist the human efforts.
