Intuit Pro Tax Division's "Auto Source Doc" will not be offered for sale during the upcoming tax season, Rich Walker, Intuit spokesperson, announced yesterday. The product was introduced fairly late last season to compete with SurePrep's 1040SCAN and Intuit had difficulty managing customer's expectations for a "Version 1" product. It was widely reported to be "disappointing" for the early adopters (several thousand firms) and for Intuit support. The product scanned and organized client documents and pulled certain data from from those documents for automatic input into either the Lacerte or ProSeries tax compliance program. Walker explained that Intuit planned to keep developing the product for later release but that in it's present form "it simply doesn't meet Intuit's rigorous quality standards".
Intuit's exit leaves SurePrep alone with a second year product (it serves ProSystem Fx Tax, GoSystem Tax RS, and Lacerte). CCH has partnered with EMC Captiva and will offer a competing product in it's ProSystem FX Document module for the coming season. They have also announced ""Scan & Fill" a considerably less robust product designed for their Small Firm Services products --- TaxWise and ATX. Meanwhile, Thomson has announced a limited pilot release of yet another competing product as a module of FileCabinet CS which will serve UltraTax CS only. Finally there is a "yet-to-be-announced" product from a "yet-to-be-named" company [my, oh my, I'm tired of this particular NDA ---- just ANNOUNCE already!] which will offer services across multiple tax compliance products --- ala' SurePrep.
We told you two years ago that this concept would soon be hot --- and it appears that it will be, indeed. We discussed this topic in some detail on the last Tech2Go podcast. [Listen here] Last year the returns processed by this model barely reached 5 figures --- look for an order of magnitude increase this year. And for 2008 returns in 2009 ---- Katie, bar the door!!
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