2022 tax software survey: CPAs assess how their return preparation products performed.

• Author: Bonner, Paul
• Position: Certified public accountants

Given how central professional-grade return preparation software is to tax practices, each year The Tax Adviser and Journal of Accountancy ask CPAs what product they use and how it worked for them in the most recent season. For the 2022 season, seven products again predominated, and they are the ones tallied in most of this article's charts and discussion. For last year's survey, see "2021 Tax Software Survey," 52 The Tax Adviser 576 (September 2021).

Products covered and profile of respondents

The survey allowed respondents to select among 13 listed products and to write in others. Those used by the greatest percentages of respondents were:

* UltraTax CS, 20%, down from 21.6% in 2021;

* Drake Tax, 17.1%, about the same as last year;

* Lacerte, 13.3%, down from 14.6% in 2021;

* ProSeries, 12.8%, up from 11.4% in 2021;

* CCH Axcess Tax, 9.1%, the same as in 2021;

* CCP1 ProSystem 6c, 8.8%, down from 9.2% last year; and

* ATX, 6.5%, up from 5.5% in 2021.

Lacerte and ProSeries are Intuit Inc. products, while ATX, CCH Axcess Tax, and CCH ProSystem 6c are Wolters Kluwer products. UltraTax CS is a Thomson Reuters product.

The remaining six products (GoSystem Tax RS, Intuit ProConnect Tax Online, TaxAct, TaxSlayer Pro, TaxWise, and TurboTax) together accounted for 11.1% of responses, and another 1.3% of respondents wrote in an entry. For relative usage of all 13 products and more background on the seven major products, such as available packages and their basic features, see "2022 Tax Software Survey: Shares of Respondents and Product and Company Information."

The survey asked about the size of the firm in which respondents prepared returns, as certain software products tend to be used in bigger or smaller firms. For example, Drake Tax was the predominant choice among sole practitioners at 30%, followed by ProSeries at 23%. At the other end of the spectrum --firms of 501 or more tax preparers --CCH Axcess Tax was the most used at 37% (and was used by only 3.7% of single-preparer firms) (see the table "Favorites by Firm Size"). UltraTax CS and Lacerte were the most consistent in their proportion of use across all firm sizes.

Similarly, the product used by a firm tended to vary according to the percentages of business versus individual returns that the firm prepared. Individual returns were a majority of returns prepared by users of all major products, but that was true of 90% of users of Drake Tax, followed by ATX and ProSeries at 88.7% and 88.2%, respectively. Individual returns were over half the workload for 61% of CCH Axcess Tax users and 67% of users of CCH ProSystem fx. Business returns were nearly 20% of the returns prepared by users of both CCH Axcess Tax and CCH ProSystem fx. Business returns represented closer to the average of 10% of returns prepared by users of other products, with Drake and ProSeries at 5.3% and 4.8%, respectively.

Most respondents--74% of the total number of users of the seven major products --were the sole person responsible for choosing their tax software, with another 16.2% having some input into the decision. Naturally, the "deciders" were more concentrated in the smaller firms, and, again, small firms tend to favor certain products over others. Nearly 94% of ATX users had made the decision to use it, followed closely by ProSeries at 93% and Drake Tax at 92.7%. CCH Axcess Tax users were the most likely to have not been involved in the decision at 28.8%.

General performance

Only Drake Tax users gave the product an average overall rating significantly above the average for all major products (4.6, versus 4.3 for all major products, on a 1-5 scale, with 5 being the highest--see the table "Overall Ratings"). Some of the highest marks respondents gave were for Drake's ease of updating and installation, how well it handled updates, and ease of e-filing, all 4.8. Also scoring 4.8 was Lacerte's ease of e-filing and ProSeries's ease of updating and installation. The lowest average rating was for ATX's integration with accounting and other software (2.9), although integration tended to be...