A few weeks ago I spent a full day with the Intuit Professional Tax executive team in Plano. We had great discussions about all sorts of tax and technology practice issues and, late in the afternoon --- with the car service waiting to make sure I didn't miss my flight from DFW --- I got a peek at the soon-to-roll-out "SmartMap" feature. Now I know that the concept of tax line groupings for automatic import from accounting to tax complaince isn't exactly new. But the Intuit engineers have made it seem so. What used to be hard enough that many practitioners [erroneously, I believe] claimed they could actually KEY a full trial balance into their tax product faster than setting up the "automatic" data import has been rendered so easy and so "intuitive" [sorry, but the pun was just SO easy!] that an entry level intern could handle it with aplomb.
Thanks to the miricles of modern programming languages and the familiarity of the Windows "drag 
and drop" metaphore practitioners can see a trial balance, by account title, on the left and watch (I did so in amazement) as those account NAMES were dragged across to the waiting TAX FORM on the right hand side of the screen. My amazement was complete when the dragged TITLE turned into a NUMBER when dropped. The "trial balance" on the left is so worked until all it's components have been properly "dropped" onto the tax form. Simple. Direct. Foolproof (well, almost ---- but fools are ever so clever!). Ingenious.
Lacertre users are in for a treat this year. Those pesky QuickBooks trial balances will be a joy to import with the SmartMap feature. It works so nice that I was ALMOST disappointed when I learned the "links" are persistent and the "fun" I described would therefore be a single year event.
Oh well, there're always new clients!
gll
