Smartsheet vs. TaxDome

Smartsheet shines for collaboration. When you have multiple people involved with planning events Smartsheet makes it easy to share and collaborate. For instance, multiple people can be in Smartsheet working at the same time. Also setting permissions for exactly those who need to know is quite easy with Smartsheet. For data analytics and general spreadsheet purposes Excel is better but for project management and event planning Smartsheet is superior

Incentivized

This is a great resource for tax firms with hundreds of clients.

Money wise however, this probably is not economically feasible for firms with only 1-2 tax preparers. It requires a lot of time and energy to build to really be fully operational.

Incentivized

• Its hard to overstate the value of familiarity. Being able to use a tool that has some familiarity takes away the time needed to train and orient employees on a new tool and allows an organization to hit the ground running.
• Smartsheet covers most of the basics of a project management tool, the usual tasks, milestones and project viewing options.
• For data viewing, you get multiple data viewing options including a calendar view (good for marketing teams and those who work around scheduling), Kanban, Gaant etc

Incentivized

• Distinguish between accounts and mere contacts (for us, this is crucial in discriminating between retained clients and prospects who haven't onboarded with us).
• Provides an editable PDF function
• Offers buildable organizers and templates
• Highly customizable pipelines that automate processes

Incentivized

• Smartsheet set up is similar to Excel, yet when you upload an Excel file, things like conditional formatting are lost. Smartsheet has its own conditional formatting, and you have to reinstate the rules. It would be great if those would apply automatically once a file is uploaded
• Some Smartsheet management and access rules can take some tweaking to work properly. This may be a case of offering more info to admins so they can apply these better and with more efficiency

Incentivized

• Chat function - would prefer a pop-out window; limited overall function (only just got emojis, "enter" does not send the message)
• Contact info is not embedded into the default account page, would like to see this first thing (since we use TaxDome in part as a CRM)
• For large client databases, the search function is somewhat slow

Incentivized

It definitely meets our needs as far as organizing and archiving our tasks and files. As we train more staff to view it, I see opportunities for more improvement, which I am sure this program can handle. I look forward to seeing continued improvement from Smartsheet on their capabilities and functionality.

Incentivized

Smartsheet is very easy to learn. However, while I have been able to pick it easily, Microsoft Excel and Project super users that I have trained on Smartsheet get bogged down in the differences and can find it frustrating. Explaining the differences ahead of time and why Smartsheet is being chosen instead of a different software seems to counteract those reactions

Incentivized

Very easy to use and generally pretty customizable to suit our company's unique needs. We haven't gotten to the stage yet where we're able to test it out on our clients, but the expectation is that the interface should be user-friendly and actually better than what we were using before (SmartVault).

Incentivized

I give this rating because it fills a niche in the market. MS Project scares many away from proper task management but there are limited tools our there, especially cloud-based that are mobile-friendly. Smartsheet fills this market gap, especially for small to medium-sized businesses. IT is not fair to compare it to MS Project, but fairer to see what gaps it fills.

Incentivized

It's absolutely paramount to take a few minutes to actually play with the software. It's nearly impossible to do anything wrong or make a mistake which cannot be fixed easily. Under the help menu is Live Training option. After you familiarize yourself with the commands, watch the live training for some in depth understanding of how to make the software fit your needs perfectly.

Jira and Redmine are much more robust and technologically advanced project management solutions. I enjoy using either when managing a very large project. However, I prefer to use Smartsheet for my smaller to medium sized projects. As for Google Drive - I would say that Google sheets and Smartsheet are almost identical in my opinion when it comes to functionality. Personally I prefer to manage smaller projects via Google Drive, but it is a personal preference!

Incentivized

Compared to Insightly in particular, TaxDome far exceeds the capability of Insightly for two main reasons: 1) Insightly is a CRM only and does not offer the multitude of other capacities such as a client portal and forms. 2) TaxDome is specifically built for tax firms and has many customized options that are extremely well suited for our particular needs, as well as tax form templates for us to use.

Incentivized

• This has really opened up collaboration across teams. A lot less working in silos.
• It hasn't fully replaced any one tool so it means having to go to another place. Hopefully, we can eliminate a tool or two in the next six months.

Incentivized

• Saves money and time. The pipelines help automate many of our processes that we had to do manually.
• Offers all-in-one (almost) hub. This also saves major time caused by jumping from app to app.
• Again with time-saving and efficiency... Allows us to have both a client-facing portal and an internal portal so we don't have to switch back and forth between systems.

Incentivized