Lacerte Tax Import Tool Set - SCAN issues and ACCOUNT import questions

[steven]

We are testing the Lacerte Tax Import function with poor results. 

(TL\DR): Skip to issues and comments from my tester below.

Does anyone know, for the ACCOUNT option(s), if the imported information is coming from a digital stream as opposed to a PDF file downloaded from the Financial institution? The Demos (YouTube) that I have seem does not complete the process and is not clear.

For those curious, the first 3 links are demos of the ACCOUNT and SCAN options followed by product info.
Financial Institution Download

The import from Scan is covered in this video.

Which financial institutions are supported for the Import Client Data From Online Accounts feature?
Note that the newer, and important, 1099-A is not included in the list.

We are using the SCAN option and in general, we are finding that the tool set is highly inaccurate and requires much review, which kind of defeats it's purpose.

This forum search is for posts regarding the "Tax Import" and some of the more relevant posts linked here.

Tax Import Not Working - Accepted Solution => It is useless for a lot of folks
Scan import - Duplicate entries (VERIFIED)
Tax Import (Scan) not working... => Unable to process documents
Lacerte Tax Import => W2Gs not importing correctly

There are not a lot of pertinent hits with the above search. Many not included are unable to process documents. Others are complaining of data quality issues. None seem to regard the ACCOUNT import.

Most posts are at least 2 years old and it does not appear from the even older videos this product is getting much love from Intuit.

We initially had some issues with our first import. We had to back out of the transaction as we did not have credit card data available to process the transaction. It's unclear if this disruption caused a corruption in the client file, but the transaction would not complete or revert, and became locked (corrupt). It's also necessary to use the menu path (Import => Tax Import => Update Tax Import Statuses..) to refresh the status, as it does not appear that Lacerte does this at all reliably on it's own.

It's also good to know that Lacerte creates a folder under [YY]Tax\IDATA called "TaxImport" and stores in there all the downloaded PDF and Excel files related to the import. For each import there are 2 document pairs (4 total). The first PDF\Excel set is for the scanned documents from the tool, the second set is the content imported into Lacerte. The tool set allows one to make changes before importing and these are in the second set.

Below are the issues and comments from my tester:

• Quality of scan is key to this process - imported forms work better than forms scanned by the client
• Excel Spreadsheet for corrections only created for stock options
• Other correction can be made on the grid
• None of the trial posts have been 100% correct - need corrections either on the input grid or in Lacerte after the post is run
• Stock Sales - always a problem with costs/descriptions - even for small forms
• Creates wash sales from gain/loss column
• Creates non covered for some stocks that are covered
• Would not be useful for large amount of stick transactions (attach instead)
• Dividends - non Dividend data seem to always be $154000 - not sure what it is reading
• No field in grid for 199A - will never post
• Foreign data posts in the dividends screen - not form 116
• Has trouble matching up accounts
• Adds blank lines or lines without payer name on many occasions
• Can run import function many times for a client - which allows importing smaller amounts at a time to help with reconciling
• W2 with multi state double posted income

Is anyone having better luck using this tool set?

Is anyone using the ACCOUNT import?

Sorry for the lengthy post, but we have a very large amount of time and effort into this component and it would be a shame for other to reinvent the wheel.