Please consider a one page list of the documents and items needed from a client. Many clients do not need/want to complete the organizers. We want to give them a list of all the specific W-2s, 1099s, they had last year. A similar list is generated with the Link program but there is no way to get it as a printable list. Other tax software offer this and I think it would be tremendously helpful. Thank you
Under review-- We're reviewing next steps to enhance organizers. Please continue to vote and post your suggestions below. Check out similar idea here: PDF Version of Organizer
I too would love to see this feature. I get many clients asking for a checklist every year so I have to manually create one for each client, wasting valuable time. And I definitely don't want to give them a multi-page organizer with so many unnecessary pages.
I feel it would be very easy for the software to do since it's already doing it within Link.
I don't disagree with your ask, but I'd probably recommend you make your own rather than hold your breath for Intuit to publish one for you.
Also, have you checked out the "condensed organizer"? It's only four pages. I've switched over to that from the "complete organizer," and am having a lot more success / positive feedback from clients on the shorter forms.
Thank you. We are using the condensed organizers and want something shorter. It would take us too long to make custom lists for each of our clients so we wanted to put the idea out there for consideration.
Absolutely! A checklist showing *specific* documents they had last year is A MUST. Not sure why this has been so neglected for so long. Clients want to know key things that pertain to them, not read a huge organizer and try determine what they can ignore or not. A list such as this:
1. [Company Name] W2
2. [Bank Name] 1099
3. [Bank Name] 1098
4. [Institution Name] 1098-T
[...ETC...]
To make it better, condense the prior deductions too such as:
1. [Charity Name] Cash Donations
2. [Vehicle Name] VLT Tabs
3. [Description] Medical Expense
[...ETC...]
Finally, enhance this even more by making an available diagnostic that shows and links to items that were on the prior return that are missing on the current year return. UltraTax has this and it makes it much quicker reviewing the return relative to the prior year to make sure you're not missing anything.
We ask for "All W-2s"; we have no knowledge--YET... we find that out when they give us the tax information--whether someone who was at JobX last year still is, or has moved on in their career. (This is especially telling for college students, who may have 5 different W-2s just for "the summer"...)
As an addendum: with an ODBC connection to your data, you can generate this kind of sheet yourself on paper. (Inserting it into a PDF version of the organizer would need to be done after saving them to somewhere, and then making changes. Since your clients' PII is involved, I recommend using passwords, and that kind of manipulation--adding pages, passwords, whatnot--may best be handled by external tools such as "PDFtk", which I highly recommend: https://www.pdflabs.com/docs/pdftk-man-page/ )
Parse the client detail--either "just this one client that I am dealing with now" as a one-off, or "do all of them into one giant data table" (which enables you to do things like "find W-2 employers across entire client base," so it could be handy)--and just extract everything of "code 800/name". The ones you probably want to include on your printout would be:
SERIES
INPUT PAGE
PURPOSE
11
10
W-2/wage
12
11
interest
13
12
dividend
14
13.1
pension/IRA
19
13.2
gambling
200
14.1
1099-misc
15
14.2
ST refund, unemployment
16
14.3
1099-Q /education
55, 56, 57, 58
20.X
passthrough K-1s
Then you build your printout--either "just this one page" for that single client, or "do them all" for the entire list--and save them somewhere. If you are doing them one at a time, you can insert that single page into the client you're working on; if you do them en masse, you just include that as an additional document to include into the mix.
.
I'm not sure if you can get it down to "one page" though: I found a couple of our clients who had more than twenty (20+) payers just from page13/pension & IRA distributions. So you may be able to make a "condensed, targeted" page (of each client's specific payers), but may fail on the "one page" request.
Sample extract:
And a "quick and dirty" sample listing (last-four of account numbers redacted, and no client names used) :
We are not programmers so we should not have to resort to what DataBaseRobert suggests. And if Proseries has had this for years, why doesn't Lacerte?
We pay top dollar for Lacerte. I believe this would be very simple programming on their part and it should be provided to us automatically. We should definitely not be required to make our own.
4 years I have asked, so far crickets. Likely they want you to use Intuit Link which unfortunately brands Intuit and not your firm, not to mention it is not the best user experience. We would LOVE to have the list as we work off it. We have had some success with the SDK, but it seems to be a version or two behind and a bit of work just to get it running, much less mapping all the codes. Data is there, why not give it to us?
Given that it took twenty years for them to open up the *data* in the first place... I know that I was banging that drum before the turn of the millenium. "Here we do the return, we have where they work, how much they make, where they bank, where their investments are... and Lacerte is willing to tell us, "total wages"." Not a whole hell of a lot of help.
To be fair, I was using one of the (Yahoo!group's) Lacerte Tax User Group's member's Visual Basic utility since about 2009 or so. He was able to open, read, and export/save the binary data file as plain text, which I then went and parsed out into a data table.
And before that, my "normal daily routine" was to Alt+P(rint) | C(lient detail) out to a text file, for everyone that I was doing an electronic transmission for, and parse *those* into a data table. Then after the end of tax season, I would go find "everyone else" (that was not filed electronically), and generate all of those at once. Since efiling was easily 95+% of our client list, this was not terribly onerous.
ODBC connection was released in 2018, so yeah, twenty years.
And once you *HAVE* all of the data... you can do anything you want with it. "Find me all spouses under the age of 35 working at Lockheed-Martin with a W-2 over 80,000 and a Schedule C with home office, where the client has no W-2 at all BUT has a Partnership in CA."
The data is there and they already provide a checklist within Intuit Link. It would be very simple for them to provide the checklist we want. I believe they are actively withholding this feature as an attempt to force us to use Intuit Link, which I have no desire to do.
I think that's the more likely mindset: "we have a (paid!) product which includes what you want, why should we devote the manpower & energy to splitting it out to an (unpaid) side product?"
And as a happy coincidence, they can feel warm & fuzzy about having made it possible for people sufficiently interested to do their own (== ODBC connection).
Lacerte, please listen to you customers! You are not serving our needs. This is not too much of an ask- we pay our fees to you and your restricting access to our data.
This is listed as under review, but here we are, the next tax season, and as far as I can tell, there is no organizer like this available at this time. Has a decision been made? This would be very useful for many clients.
Under review-- We're reviewing next steps to enhance organizers. Please continue to vote and post your suggestions below. Check out similar idea here: PDF Version of Organizer
I am so glad that you are finally looking into this. I will add that it really isn't reinventing the wheel. Take a look at ProSeries checklist organizer. It is based on the client's information from the year before. It is exactly what is needed.
I'd like to see basically a letter, with a detailed list of the forms they had in the prior year (bullet point form W-2s, 1099s, 1098s).
Maybe a brief (undetailed) bullet point list of the type of expenses they had in the prior year - charitable contributions, real estate taxes, etc. No specifics, though. I don't need my 80 year old client that gave $20 to 30 organizations to have that on this letter/organizer.
For most clients this should be one page, in not too small of a font.
Yes this is so imperative. So many people ignore the organizer because it is so big (even condensed is large). If there was a checklist of documents last year for the major sources of forms (W-2s, 1099s (DIV, INT, B, NEC, R, etc) 1098s and so on) that'd be super helpful.
While electronic is great a paper version to simplify this would be great.
"Maybe a brief (undetailed) bullet point list of the type of expenses they had in the prior year - charitable contributions, real estate taxes, etc. No specifics, though. I don't need my 80 year old client that gave $20 to 30 organizations to have that on this letter/organizer." -- amec
However, I have to say that giving a client that just says, "give us all of your interest income statements" doesn't really help most clients. "Okay, I know that I have a bunch... but was it 17 of them, or 23?"
This is available with intuit link basically but clients do not want ANOTHER sign on to another thing. If this type of checklist is available already in a different format, it should be able to be created as an simple "organizer"
I'd like a plain list of the prior year documents entered. Form and payer name.
The organizer is with lots of blank spaces and many pages to sort through, this could be a 1-2 page list or editable form like the tax letter.
They could be broken out in sections (1099-INT, 1099-R, 1099-Div, etc) list a bullet point list of the payer name field value.
example:
Client name
1099-INT
Bank of America
Wells Fargo
1099-SSA
Taxpayer
Spouse
1099-DIV
Fidelity
Robinhood
W-2
Facebook
Intuit
Most of my clients prefer a list to a lengthy intimidating planner. They know who to look for snail mail from or which website to look for documents on.
This is low effort field consolidation ticket (form type, payer name) that would save me HOURS of typing these lists myself or exchanging "hey you forgot X, Y Z, documents - find them"
Having this hit list might be a first step to uploading documents, or using a lacerte turbo tax on their own.
This is what ProSeries has offered for years and I do mean years! I don't understand the delay in this being included with Lacerte. The code is already written.
I've been kicking around ways of doing this as painlessly as possible, and my first question is: would you want anything BEYOND what is detailed in the Organizer?
These are the Lacerte pages that are currently included in the Organizer (plus some random number of state-specific pages, depending on your "DB State" input at the bottom of page1/client info):
First column is the input sheet that we humans go to, in order to make entries. Second column is the "Series #" (look at the bottom left corner of a paper input sheet) that Lacerte stores the information by. Third column is what it *IS*.
Would you actually want the page47/Notes included?
Would you want more than those items listed?
Would you want to EXCLUDE any of those?
Would you need anything more extensive than the sample that I put together previously (last post visible on Page 1 of this thread)? Basically a section header and then "list of items" for that section.
Is this something that you would print for ALL clients? For clients of "some specific F4/status" (or several of them)?
Would you prefer it as a PDF (which you could then forward by email OR print out) or straight to printed copy right away?
.
If anyone is willing to experiment with free software, let me know ("ParadoxForLacerte <at> Yahoo.com") and I can take you through downloading Lacerte's ODBC setup, Paradox's free Runtime package, and some simple Scripts & Reports within Paradox to parse out the information and make use of it.
Hello, my input - what is on page 1 of this thread is perfectly good. In all honesty, it is more for the clients to have a checklist and us to have a checklist. Anyone with a Schedule C, E or F would need to be more detailed and hopefully would provide us with their ledger.
We are not programmers. We should not have to download "free software" to manipulate Lacerte's code. We are paying a premium for this tax software and a simple checklist should be provided as it is already in the Lacerte code. I don't understand why they are withholding this feature.
The checklist like the Pro Series example shown above would be perfect. And that is what most of us are asking for. We do not want a multi-page organizer as it can be confusing for some clients and unnecessarily wastes paper for the simpler clients. We can use the organizer for the more complex clients.
I am just looking for a one page organizer that shows what a client had the year before so it can better enable them to get it to us all at once and not forget something. Client's do not like the large organizers. They want something simple and I want something simple for them. After one page, their attention is lost. I agree that if they have a schedule C, E or F, that is a separate conversation. When we were on ProSeries, we used this checklist for all of our individual clients. We can always make it a pdf.
If the 1-page organizer doesn't happen, what are your best practices for getting client information?
Meet in person to review?
Additional charge for late information or discounts for early filers?
Intuit Link? Not many of my clients like an electronic organizer. I need to promote it to more clients as I think it is worthwhile. It has a feature to remind clients, right?
New software that has it is on the table for us next year. I just don't believe they are going to get the job done, which is disappointing. They also do not have a software feature that highlights what is missing from last year for an existing client that other software has. Missing these options in Lacerte does leave room for errors due to missing information. We have a person in the office that is going to try to extract the information that we are looking for. I was checking one last time before she goes through the effort to try and make it happen.
Tax season is well under way and it seems obvious we are not going to get this feature. It would be so easy for Intuit to provide since Intuit Link has exactly what we are asking for. Our office has no interest in using Intuit Link, so it seems we are stuck with either sending a "condensed" organizer (which is at a minimum 7 pages) or manually creating a list of prior-year items for clients.
