You might also be interested in
Replies (15)
Please login or register to join the discussion.
I hope its less clunky than the hub which acts as a massive drag to what was previously a very good bit of tax return software, pulling it down from "best of breed" 10 years ago into the "meh" zone.
All I want from tax calc is to compute the tax, and do it well.
All the rest is just flannel and detracts from a what is a decent core product.
Whilst some of your customer may be growing, I'd wager the vasty majority by number are no bigger than 1 fees earner + a couple of assistants and don't want 'big system' capability, and are happy to buy their own "best of breed" practice management to suit their own business. Which might just be anything from a couple of excel sheets and an outlook calendar, to a modern web based system.
I want TaxCalc Practice Manager to be good. TC is very late in this game. I hope TaxCalc Practice Manager has done a massive catching up with the likes of Accountancy Manager before releasing this software.
For a number of years now, Taxcalc has been heading down the "all integrated" route.
They need to be careful as they could well end up falling between 2 stools - not enough features for practices that want a "one stop" solution but too pricey and too focused on PM for the smaller firms.
Are there any users out there who have switched between IRIS and Taxcalc - I'd be interested in their experiences.
We made this move around 2 to 3 years ago for accounts and tax. Only regret was not doing it earlier !
Yes us, we found Iris was becoming far too expensive for what we needed, we looked around and had a few demo's , we found Taxcalc to be the most straight forward. We are an 11 employee practice, regulated and it suits our needs. The practice management side has been a long time coming I asked about time recording a few years ago and was told it wasn't on their radar.
I used Iris in industry. When I set up my own practice I chose Taxcalc because Iris/PTP was much too expensive. However, Iris Accounts Production was much more flexible - you could alter /replace every note, hide irrelevant notes, etc. Taxcalc by comparison is more restrictive. However the tax side is fine.
As many have said, the core product ( tax return production ) is first class. Unfortunately the rest is becoming increasingly average and more expensive as the years pass. My personal gripe is with the accounts production module, which doesn't appear to have been updated since it was first introduced. The final accounts have so many frustrating formatting errors which I'm sure could be corrected in a few minutes ( rogue underlining, headings sometimes in CAPITALS, sometimes in lower case and sometimes in Lower Case ). The work round is to import to Word and make adjustments - fine, but it is supposed to be an automatic accounts production program. Can't help but think that they are neglecting what should be part of the core product whilst trying to sell themselves to the larger firms.
This is very encouraging. We currently use Glide as our work tracker. I can`t deny it would be good to have it all under one roof. I don`t find the current hub too enticing!
Well, that's telling them!
Seems its unanimously thumbs down. I thought about changing to BTC a few years ago. But I couldn't import my existing data, and anyway who has time to learn a whole new system? So I decided I'd wait for TaxCalc to catch up. I'm willing to give it a try, but not full of hope.
This is great news for the smaller practitioner who uses TaxCalc. We use Highrise at the moment for practice management, but I would prefer if it was all integrated into the taxcalc suite.
There always seems to be some negative comments towards Taxcalc. Not sure why this is the case. Yes, the accounts production module was poor when first introduced, but that was quite a few years back. There have been numerous improvements over the years, and updates on a fairly regular basis, so it is quite a good product now.
I very much doubt they can compete with Senta or Accountancy Manager. I looked at their practise management side a few months ago and it was to put it kindly 'basic'. Yes I would love to have everything under one roof, however personally I won't compromise I want 'best of breed' in everything even though this may lack integration. Will it do automated emails and texts? can it be configured? does it have a CRM capability? All these things look great when sold by the company, but when you test them you often find they don't come up to muster
Different practices have quite different practice management needs, so will find a different tool works best for them.
"one size fits all" always struggle with being too complex for the small business and too basic for the larger ones.
This is why I like to chose what works for my business on an application by application basis.
I really do hope this works well. Outlook/email integration for automated reminders and Xero client list API next please!