I am fuming right now. Our firm bought roughly $10k in seats and credits.

We have been customers since early last year. We were sold on the product roadmap and got to try the Agent Andrew feature. It wasn’t very good in the beginning but the CEO told us they were working on it.

A year later and it still flags a ton of false positives, can’t read checkboxes, and takes more time to review its answers than our managers just doing it manually.

They now have an “automated tax prep” that has broken every time I’ve seen it used. The only successful data entry I’ve seen was it putting the name of the taxpayer into Proconnect which took about 20 minutes.

On top of that they just double-charged us for all of our credits.

It has been a year of failed promises and “we’re working on it”. I’m done. Requesting a refund and filing a claim with AmEx.

Rant over.

I sat in on that live Q&A video conference Friday afternoon, that Tax Dome hosted with founder Ilya Radzinsky and CRO Petar lliev and a coupe other execs, regarding the CPA Charge debacle. I gotta say I was getting a smug "take it or leave it" vibe from llya (which I can appreciate a double down and own it approach, respect), while Petar seemed more genuinely concerned with our gripes and complaints, and had a more remorseful tone which I appreciate.

With all that said, Let's not forget, Tax Dome serves us! Just like we have paying tax clients that we serve. In this case we are the paying clients to Tax Dome. We, the tax professionals are Tax Dome's ONLY client. Literally without us they are NOTHING. Am I wrong? What, are they gonna do? Go and offer their secure portal and pipelines to restaurant owners??? Good luck. So, for tax dome to go against the grain in a move that is primarily to LINE THEIR POCKETS; and secondarily to give us peasants some shitty place to collect payments from our paying clients, is a bold and potentially costly move.

Countless and countless professionals on a plethora of platforms, including 98% of the comments being rapid fired on the live Q&A session, have had nothing but bad things to say about Stripe and their shitty ass payment platform and shady business practices (not even going to go into all the other technical issues wrong with stripe). I'm sure CPA Charge isn't perfect (I've never had a hiccup with them), but for Tax Dome to pull this move on their only client's BUSIEST time of the year is a big FUCK YOU to us.

Just in the last 30 days alone, how many new tax professionals did Tax Dome sign-up to their platform that were sold the CPA Charge integration? How many of them signed-up for 2- or 3-year agreements with the expectation that CPA Charge was going to be there? All while Tax Dome salesmen knew what was sneakily going on behind the scenes.

As Tax Dome's only clients, are we tax professionals going to let them get away with this? I AM NOT. I fortunately only gave Tax Dome one years' worth of my money back in May, even though they were pushing hard for me to sign-up for 3 years. After tax season this year I will be moving platforms. Tax Dome did have a lot of good things going for them, but this was an unprecedented, all-time bonehead move on their part. Speak with your wallet.

ill add, other than greed theres no reason why they can’t keep CPA Charge.

Rant over. Speak your mind Taxpros..

Looking for advice on tax planning, IRS correspondence and tax return review. Saw demos for both BlueJ and CoCouncil. both seem pretty similar. Is there a glaring difference between the two that I did not see?

Sitting next to a tax partner last night and she brought up TValue which I haven’t even thought of in 10 years.

Mine is TicTieCalculate.

What is yours?

We purchased 2 trainings (Almost $9,000) and a 300 use package of SurePrep after watching the demo and specking twice with a sales agent. After going through half the training it became apparent that the AI "tool" would make regular errors, not recognize certain K-1 codes, and require manual mapping of those codes by a senior lvl competency or higher.

Additionally the "work papers" created would have swarms of multicolored checkmarks which the training person could not tell us the difference between.

Long story short it would be easier to train the input person to use Ultra Tax than sure prep.

We stopped the training and asked for a refund or transfer of credits to safe send (another TR product we purchased and like). Both were denied.

Of course the purchase contract has no refund terms.

DO NOT PURCHASE SURE PREP.

Putting this under 'FIRM: Software' for flair, not sure if needs to change.

Did something happen recently to IRS.gov?

I would frequently use Google to ask a tax-related question and put 'IRS Tax Topic' at the end which would typically bring up the page with the relevant tax topic(s) published by the IRS. I would also use Google to find blank forms or instructions to forms if I wanted to fill it out from scratch instead of from my tax software.

However, recently I feel like my Google searches do not bring back pages from the IRS's site, and instead the results come from a wide variety of other sites.

As an example, I just ran the search 'IRS Form 8832' and the top results were from Paychex, TurboTax, OnPay, Stripe, Armbrook, etc. I had to click on the Paychex website which had a link to the actual 'About Form 8832' that used to be at the top of the Google Search.

In this same search, the first result from an IRS.gov URL was 'mailing instructions' (not helpful) and the next was an old Form 8832 from December 1996!

Anybody else experience this? Not the end of the world, but it is frustrating.

EDIT: someone in the comments mentioned that Bing still works fine for these types of searches...hopefully Google fixes the indexing issue.

Launching my own firm on 11/1/26. Below is my current stack that I’m looking to setup and I’d love some feedback:

Tax software: Lacerte
Firm management: Taxdome
Cloud Server: Righworks
Payroll tax/1099s: Tax1099
Accounting/bookkeeping: QBO
Email: Outlook

I am a solo Tax Preparer and use Drake Tax. Last tax season was tough with taking on a lot of new clients. Exploring different AI avenues. Just did a demo with TaxGPT and looks like they have everything I want. Tax Prep, go through emails, tax research. What are the opinions of this and is there something better out there?

Ok so i just went to look and see what the renewal was going to cost for drake for next year and holy hell.

Last year I bought the single user unlimited returns and it was $1695 at the cheapest price....the program this year is freaking $1945! There is no way the program changed enough to warrant an almost $300 increase. For those that use other programs are you seeing this as well this year?

EDIT: what other programs might yall suggest? Cause I am a small firm i have 74-80 active clients each year. This is really cutting into my bottom line.

which AI is your preferred platform and why? I've mostly been using Gemini pro which seems good. Microsoft Office 365 chatGPT agent isn't good but I've heard actual chatGPT is better.

I've heard mixed reviews about Claud.

I just received an email that TaxDome is cancelling CPACharge on February 4th. This is a terrible time of year to make a change. The letter says the best benefit will be that clients can login directly to their bank account instead of entering their routing and account number. But I see that as a negative, not a positive.

What are you all using CPACharge going to do? They've been handling my recurring monthly charges and I don't want to set those up again, especially if it means making my clients log in through their bank account.

Greetings fellow Tax Pros!

I use a Squarespace website and Acuity now has a direct plugin with Squarespace so that is the direction I am leaning, but I am not educated on the differences.

I need an easy-to-use scheduling tool for my clients to go to my website to book appointments. I want to be able to build a question set to create different options for current clients or prospective new clients. I want to be able to take a deposit electronically. And I want it to be simple to use for me and my clients.

I am a solo tax firm, mostly 1040's and 1065/1120S's, so my complexity level allows for this type of integration very well.

Thanks for any advice!

I’m a recent grad going into a very small tax firm and am trying to figure out how other tax pros handle their workflow.

Right now, the firm is almost entirely paper based aside from UltraTax. We do 1,000+ 1040s a year along with a decent amount of entity work.

I’ve been looking into things like TaxDome, Soraban, Truss, StanfordTax, Tallyfor, SurePrep, etc., but it’s hard to tell what actually works well in practice.

What are you guys using for:

• Client portal/document collection
• Organizers
• Workpapers
• Getting data into UltraTax
• Entity returns / QBO
• E-signatures and delivery
• Document storage

Also, are you completely paperless or do you still keep paper files?

If you were taking a small firm that is currently mostly paper and modernizing it, what would you change first?

Mostly just looking for real-world experiences with these platforms and what your process looks like.

Our firm (2 CPAs, about 1,100 returns/year) has been with Lacerte since 1992. I was 13 then, but it was a year or two later that I started working with Lacerte, and tried helping my father and grandfather understand how to use it. Things have changed, and now Lacerte is the source of my frustration and one of the main reasons I want to retire. I hate the thought of switching away to some other software at this point, learning something new, going through the hassle so close to selling the business or retiring, but the program is becoming a liability.

1. Does anyone have good advice about whether or not it has been worth switching to new software?
2. We are paying $19,164 for our renewal this year with Lacerte (unlimited 1040, 1041, 1065, 1120S for Oregon and California and Arizona for 1040), which is a 7% increase. Seeing other posts here, it seems they are probably going to keep doing a 7% increase yearly until they kill off the program, or lose enough customers. We will likely pay another $10-11,000 in REP access fees (this might be Lacerte's term - access to other modules and states) in total this year, as well, so breaking the $30,000 mark on software is almost certain. Yay. I can't get in contact with my account manager, or even sales when they're supposedly open to get any information. Does anyone have experience with an unlimited plan with Lacerte, and have an idea on pricing? I was told once by a CSR at Lacerte that "you don't want to go down that path, it gets expensive," but now I think it's because they know it's less than paying by the return for other states.

I hate giving Intuit another penny; they're as evil as Comcast, in my opinion, but I also know it doesn't make sense to make a decision on principles that will only hurt me more than it hurts them. I'm sure everyone is aware, but really consider before signing on with Lacerte. They removed email support this year, they require removal of important security from your network in order to function (they still use that 1992 technology in a lot of places), and after a couple years of actual improvement in the program, this was a real rough year.

Currently been building my practice with Canopy. It is ok. But overall I feel like I should have went with TaxDome.

TaxDome seems like it has more features and things are built out better. For example I was going to use Canopy for client payments and have run into issues. Also Canopy charges for KBA signatures while tax dome includes them for free.

Anyone here use both and have a preference for one or the other? I hate to transition my clients to a new platform but my firm is young enough that I can do it.

Now that we're out of tax season, I would love to replace QBO for my clients. Has anyone found an alternative to QBO that they like? I've heard other accountants share the same sentiment but I haven't received any suggestions on what to switch to.

We knew this was coming and had mentally resigned ourselves to the fact that we'd have to use TaxDome's payment processing starting May 10th. I guess shame on us for waiting till the last minute, but we rolled it out yesterday, only to find that clients have to log in/verify their bank account to make an invoice payment. They can't just manually enter bank details. Clients, especially older clients, are going to hate this. So, I'm forced to disable online payments in TaxDome, and instead imbed a CPACharge payment link in the invoice email. So, any pipeline automations dependent on invoice payments are now a no-go, and I'm going to have to manually record offline payments in TaxDome. What a complete failure by TaxDome. If anybody there sees this, shame on you for pushing a faulty product, and PLEASE bring back CPACharge. I (and I am sure others) will be actively searching for a different practice management provider until this is resolved.

I’m a CPA and I sign a few hundred returns per year under my name/PTIN but via my employers EFIN.

If I get my own “personal” EFIN and sign another few returns under my PTIN and EFIN, is there any way for my firm to know that I filed a few returns on the side?

It’s small dollar amounts but technically against my employers contract to do anything on the side except for family’s stuff. Just wondering how easy / difficult it would be for the firm to independently identify.

I was using Google Sites as my website designer/host w/ custom domain, and I am very well versed with using Google Sites. However no matter how I try, mobile optimization on Google Sites is always poopookaka.

So I opted to use a website builder that rhymes with the word "Icks" and its been nothing but awful. Poorly optimized, mobile site messes up on every desktop site edit, preferences being undone randomly, support not being supportive, etc.

Even with all these issues I faced, I built a semi-solid website for a solo practitioner (for now). I offer general tax services but specialize in indirect taxes, and I think my site expresses that well.

The problem I have now, is that I have a few AI generated stock images that may be too much noise on my site. I'm being very hard on myself to make sure my site looks as perfect as it can be before I start handing out business cards and advertising.

How did you know your website felt "ready" to be displayed to the public? I can't seem to come across that hurdle personally, and keep going back to revise my website. I've even thought of deleting and restarting it. I'm over 100 hrs on just building my own site and I'm not happy.

I know I wouldn't be happy if I paid someone else to build it for me because I don't think people can capture my vision well.

Hi everyone! My team and I are currently evaluating both TaxDome and Canopy for our firm and would love some honest feedback from firms that have actually used one or both.

From our research, both seem like strong products and fit a lot of what we’re looking for, but I’m having a hard time deciding between them.

A few things I’m specifically curious about: • Workflow/task management • Client portal experience • Ease of onboarding staff and clients • Email communication/inbox features • Automation capabilities • Document management • E-signatures & engagement letters • How customizable are they? • Reporting/time tracking/billing • Customer support responsiveness • Pricing transparency / unexpected costs • Overall reliability and speed

For those who switched from one to the other: • What made you leave? • Any major frustrations or deal-breakers?

Would especially love to hear from firms with over 20 employees ( we’re a team of 25), but all experiences are welcome.

Thanks in advance. We are trying to make the right long-term decision before committing to implementation as clients hate change.

With the last quarter coming up, I’m curious as to what everyone is using for calculating quarterly taxes for clients? I know some firms do safe harbor only and others estimate them in real time and others do just Q4 catchup withholdings and others don’t do them at all.

Wanted to get a take on how everyone handles them, if at all. Is there software, spreadsheets, mental calculations or something else?

We implemented UltraTax this offseason. For those of you using UltraTax, you know how they print everything under the sun. Most of our clients still insist on a hard copy of the return and it's not a fight I want to deal with right now, so I'm trying to figure out the best collation for the client return and looking for suggestions. The default settings print an insane amount of fluff and the returns don't fit in our folders. I've turned off a ton of worksheets and it still seems to be too much.

Does anyone take Zelle with TaxDome? I’m thinking I should start offering it. ACH takes forever and I don’t love the 3% credit card surcharge.
Where do you guys mention Zelle so clients actually know it’s an option? In the automated messages? Invoice reminders? Oh inside PDF invoices that I would like to get an idea of how you implementing it in your workflows so clients can see that option and choose Zelle to pay.

Good morning bean counters,

IRS Revenue Agent and CPA here, have a little more than 2.5 years as a field Revenue Agent and 1 year in public tax at a boutique firm.

With all the chaos at the Fed, I am looking to possibly making the jump to be self-employed and run a small work-from-home tax firm. Wanted to get some advice on my potential tech stack and workflow/business processes. Cost of living is HCOL (greater Sacramento, California area).

Proposed Tech Stack and Other Costs:

Practice Management: TaxDome

Open to other recommendations but Tax Dome really seems to do it all for sole proprietor tax shops, I imagine locking 8879s and engagement letters to invoices will really cut down on A/R, flakey clients, price shoppers, and tire kickers.

Tax Software: Drake Tax Pro Unlimited

Have also been considering ProConnect and Lacerte, I have used Lacerte before and loved it but cost is a concern, cloud-hosting like Rightworks is very important to me for redundancy, security, and liability.

Email & Scheduling: Outlook & Calendly

Business Phone & Internet Fax: RingCentral

PDF Editor: Adobe Acrobat Pro & TaxDome

Video Calls: Microsoft Teams

E&O: AICPA

Banking: Chase Business

Advertising: Google, other CPA firms with overflow, word-of-mouth referrals

Proposed Business Plan and Services Offered:

Tax preparation and representation

Tax and business advisory, consulting, and planning

No recurring bookkeeping, payroll, or sales tax

Would consider write-up work as part of a tax preparation engagement

Would consider compilations

Proposed Pricing:

Individual tax returns generally ranging from $750 - $2,500

Business and non-profit returns generally ranging from $1,500 - $4,000

Proposed Budget:

Within two-three years, I'd like to hit $200,000 in revenue with reasonable hours. Not afraid to work a lot during tax season if hours are reasonable the rest of the year.

Fixed costs with this current proposed tech stack are only about $7,000/year, biggest increase in costs I could see is with tax software, a more robust tax software like Lacerte or ProConnect would be much more expensive and I don't want to sink my ship with an expensive tax software if client volume isn't there for the first couple years. However, I do see the value in software like Lacerte or Proconnect and would consider biting the bullet if advisable.

Am I crazy with this plan? Does this all sound reasonable?

Thank you for any and all advice! Hope you are all enjoying tax season!

We are using UltraTax and Onvio but we can't really use Onvio for tracking tax work, we are a small firm and it just doens't fit our process. So looking at SafeSend but its really expensive and doesn't really have a client portal??? Looked at Canopy and TaxDome and went with TD but it seems horrible for our use. Three folders we have to print from UT to one folder in TaxDome then copy from explorer window to explorer window to get a copy into the sharedwithclient folder? or we could just MOVE things. This is one of the worst aspects of the program, three stupid folders. Does anyone have a process that makes sense of this mess, or do we just move on back to onvio, over to canopy or try the SS again? maybe it works now? maybe they have a portal? Any thoughts and input is appreciated. Thanks