USA Does any of you use Drake Software to prepare taxes?

[FranciscoTorres]

I worked in public accounting preparing taxes for 3 years where we used UtraTax. I have been working as a senior accountant for an online school now, but I want to make money on the side preparing taxes. I never heard of Drake software until a couple of months ago. What software do you use? Any recommendations of a cheap tax software..

 

[Renuka Rana]

Hey Francisco Torres, Drake is great software for tax management as it helps professionals to prepare tax and returns quickly and efficiently. Drake has been voted number one for its overall rating, price, support and most recommended for new practice by The Tax Adviser research. In Drake software, you can also add notes for tax forms and returns that assist as reminders to you. It also has an e-filing feature that enables users to submit returns tax online by attaching PDF doc of return tax. There are many tools that can be integrated by drake software which make the tax workflow easy and balancing like GruntWorx, E-Pay, Secure File Pro, etc. As you have mentioned, you are looking freelance option which will include handling multiple and separately-located clients. I would recommend to use a hosted version of Drake tax software. Why so? Because it will allow you to interact with your client conveniently, you can access your files from anywhere at any time, and the data management in the cloud is super-easy. According to my opinion, from tax software options like ATX, Drake, Lacerte, ProSystem, and Ultratax, the "Drake tax software" is the cheapest. I hope it will help.

 

[Drmdcpa]

I started using Drake last year. I have been kicking myself for not starting it earlier.

I actually tried it about ten years ago, but it was very limited, and I do a variety of complex returns including 1040, 1041, 1065, 1120, 1120S, 990, 706, 709 and multistate.

I thought Lacerte was my only real option. But their product and service are lacking. So I took the plunge quite concerned I was jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.

A cost comparison made me even more concerned so much so that I called Drake to find out why they were so much less expensive and what was I missing.

I have found Drake to be much more technically accurate than Lacerte. This can be a drawback if you do not know what you are doing because Lacerte is easier to override than Drake. Thus you do not necessarily need to know what you are doing in Lacerte; you can just override stuff.

The few times I needed to call Drake, a person answers the phone almost immediately. That is the person that helps you, and it never took more than a few minutes at best. With Lacerte it takes a few minutes just to get to a person that may or may not be able to help you.