TaxDome Reviews

Pros

This software has the features I've been searching for for the past 3+ years. The customer support is amazing, responses are fast and if there is ever anything I'm looking for, if it's not available it's in the works!
Specifically, though I love that this app has the request feature that I can use for general communication with a client throughout tax season. Also the Emails as tasks. OMG, this makes my work life so much more streamlined!

Cons

There are still some features I would like to see, but as I already said these are in the works and I fully believe this company is hustling to get us, users, what we want!

Pros

I appreciate having almost all the tools I use on a daily basis in one program. It has been super helpful!

Cons

Like others have said, there is a steep learning curve and you need to put the time in to get it set up properly and implement. The great thing is that you can learn the tools that you need right away and then add others as you need them or find out about them.

Alternatives Considered

RightSignature, Doc.It Suite, ShareFile, monday.com, Karbon and Adobe Acrobat

Reasons for Choosing TaxDome

Most every function I received out or each of the above software are part of the "package" in TaxDome. I was able to cancel many of these subscriptions and save money by using just TaxDome.

Reasons for Switching to TaxDome

All in one solution and cost savings were the primary drivers. However, my clients are liking the portal and I hope to have 100% engagement on the portal.

Pros

The features are all there except for scheduling; Contact, communication, document management with client portal - but poorly organized.

Cons

The design of this platform is not thought out, to say you have all features- then throw it all in there with no real thought on how to be efficient doesn't build value.

For example, the journey to go from a contact comment back to the document that was being reviewed takes over 7 clicks. SEVEN CLICKS. Working one file can take over 100 clicks, multiply that by 8-10 files in a day... my hand is in pain by the end of the day from all the clicking... and scrolling. Every activity takes over 5 clicks from one thing to the next.

The goal of software is to build efficiency. It is easier for me to open a paper file and review and makes notes by hand then it is to use this software. The actual functionality of this system was not done by a software designer who didn't understands how to build an efficient system. It's like a house with the all the appliances and furniture that go in a house shoved into the living room; its all there you just have to sort through a lot to get what you need when you need it. Without an organized design you are creating too many moves and means wasted time, which means wasted money.

The purpose of software is to cut time and in return save money, this system in the 2yrs I've used it, has added time to my workload. To say the least I am shopping to get out of it, or i'll end up needing surgery for carpal tunnel.

Alternatives Considered

Canopy and Jetpack Workflow

Reasons for Switching to TaxDome

The list of features; unfortunately the presentation of the features gave the impression of organization...

Pros

The ease of use for our clients is the most important thing for us. We want them to feel like the entire process from start to finish, is simple.

Cons

It was a little daunting for us getting started with the software because it has so many features. It took a lot of trial and error on our end but only because we started our business in the middle of tax season so we had to hit the ground running without going through the various training materials.

Alternatives Considered

Karbon

Reasons for Switching to TaxDome

We felt TaxDome gave us the most value for our money and would provide a streamlined process for our clients.

Pros

The cost of Tax Dome is much better in comparisson to other similar platforms. I've used 2 others and both were over 1200.00 per year and did not come with support as good as Tax Dome! The customer support is really outstanding. They help with setting things up and you can reach out to them anytime, and you get real live people to help. Also, it bares repeating, the price is just unbeatable for what you get.

Cons

It does take some getting used to. Setting up is time consuming as well as transferring files and clients from different platforms. The pipelines are great but getting them set up, if there isn't already a pipleline, is super time consuming. Definitely not something you'd want to do in the middle of tax season.

Pros

Love all the features, from bulk emails to workflow. My favorite are the pipelines. I'm able to set up multiple pipelines for projects such as LBD tax returns, Sales Tax Returns, Annual repeating pipelines for business tax, annual report, etc. Tagging the client as an individual or tagging the company, either way you are able to add all jobs to a pipeline without thinking, keeping a list or worry about missing anyone. I love the fact that TaxDome is constantly evolving to meet the needs of the users.

Cons

The user settings. Need the ability to restrict settings per user. Currently it is all of one or none of any. If you don't want a user to be able to delete an invoice and you restrict invoicing, they are not only restricted from deleting and invoice, they are restricted from viewing, or creating an invoice.

Pros

Task Management: TaxDome provides a task management system that helps users manage their workload, stay on top of deadlines, and track task progress.Tax Calculation: TaxDome provides a tax calculation system that helps users accurately calculate tax amounts for their clients, with support for a variety of tax forms and schedules.Compliance Management: TaxDome helps users stay compliant with tax regulations by providing a platform that ensures that all necessary tax forms and documents are filed on time.Time and Cost Savings: TaxDome's automation and integration capabilities can help users save time and reduce costs by automating manual tasks and reducing the need for multiple software tools.

Cons

Learning Curve: TaxDome offers many powerful features, but the platform may take some time for users to learn how to use effectively. New users may need to spend some time familiarizing themselves with the platform's tools and features.Cost: TaxDome's pricing plans may be more expensive than some other tax and accounting software options on the market, particularly for smaller firms or solo practitioners who do not require all the features provided.Customer Support: Some users have reported experiencing issues with TaxDome's customer support, particularly with slow response times or unhelpful responses.

Pros

I like that the CRM is made for tax professionals instead of trying to make another system work for our profession.

Cons

I wish it was completely integrated with my tax software, but I am happy with it so far.

Alternatives Considered

HoneyBook and Canopy

Reasons for Switching to TaxDome

Price, features, integrations

Pros

Ease of use, and the ability to have support when needed.

Cons

the price is costly compared to others I don't like the way they hold you hostage with the pricing also the false advertising of $50 a month but you have to pay that upfront or you pay $85 a month and you have to pay for one user upfront

Pros

There are SO many capabilities within Tax Dome! I can definitely see this being a major time saver for me.

Cons

TaxDome is a bit complex to set up. I understand why it is, I just wish there were a simpler way.

Pros

Probably the best thing about TD is that it does so many things adequately. But the strongest feature is the workflow management and the way that it harmonizes with client communication---the synergy there is market-beating.

Cons

I am disappointed in the timekeeping function, especially the reporting. It seems like a very simple function compared to their sophisticated workflow functions. It is downright primitive. I also can't figure out whether it will really be usable as a CRM. They advertise that, but I'm not sure it can really replace even the most basic CRM.

Alternatives Considered

Canopy

Reasons for Choosing TaxDome

The benefits of having Organizers, Secure Messaging, File Transfer, Job Tracking, and Automated Communication all exist within one integrated system. We were losing so much time transferring data between systems.

Switched From

Jotform

Reasons for Switching to TaxDome

The transparent pricing was probably #1. But also TD is just more powerful, if a little less slick and shiny. I feel like no one understands what Tax firms need quite like TaxDome does.

Pros

Tax Dome seems to have most of the features we were looking for and if they didn't have the feature it appears to be in the roadmap to add to the software. I really like the workflows, even though we have not implemented them yet.

Cons

It is not as customizable as I would like. I am hoping that this will improve as new features are added and updated. My biggest complaint is that the virtual drive cannot be synced in real time to a local drive, which does conflict with our ISP (Information Security Plan); we are copying and pasting into the local drive for now, but during tax season, especially, we have a lot of data that is changed constantly.

Alternatives Considered

Intuit Practice Management

Reasons for Choosing TaxDome

Costly and archaic. Working Papers also had more features than we were using so the cost did not make sense for our practice.

Reasons for Switching to TaxDome

The cost was high with Intuit Practice Manager and the features we wanted were add-ons and would have been an additional cost.

Pros

This product is focused on its customer base. It is not trying to be all things to all industries. The developers understand how accountants and tax preparers work. Even in the short time I have been a client, there is a strong development effort to make the product better and more useful. Customer vote on what improvements they want to see added to the program and TaxDome provides a roadmap on what features are being developed and when they will be implemented. TaxDome's culture is focused on customer service.

Cons

It is clear that TaxDome has done a good job of integrating CRM, document storage, e-signatures, and client communications. As a browser-based solution, it suffers from all the problems that products that work over the Internet have. Whenever I have problems it is hard to know whether it is my internet connection, the number of browser screens open, or something with TaxDome and its servers. I do know it is as good as my previous broswer-based CRM and its speed is comparable to QuickBooks Online.

I would like the email and message templates to be better. Currently, you can't use fields in the contact records within emails to make them more client-friendly. Also, the invoicing features need improvement. The amount of information that can be included in an invoice is limited and I provide my clients with a line item invoice to show why their tax returns cost what they do.

Pros

- Project Management, the way accountants, need it to be.
- Phenomenal portal and client management
- They have the best pipe designers and pipe layers and just great, great pipes
- Document mark-up in the client portal
- E-signature and KBA is awesome!

Cons

- It's complex, but it's manageable
- Invoicing could use some love
- Shortcodes --- I could soapbox about why shortcodes are available in some screens and not others, or why the shortcodes are so limited, but I'm not going to....
- Little to no integration with Zapier, it's there, but it's far from developed

Pros

I love that it has all of the features I really wanted for a great client experience and workflow management. The client portal is phenomenal. The Workflows are easy to setup and the templates are a great starting point. Not too complex and not too simplistic

Cons

I wish that recurring tasks customized to a specific client could be built into a recurring pipeline job instead of having to link recurring tasks when they're created. I can tell this feature is missing because of the way the software was designed to streamline the workflow management experience which is otherwise phenomenal. The minor inconvenience of linking a task to a job after the fact is minimal compared to the rest of the benefits I have from this software.

Alternatives Considered

Karbon

Reasons for Choosing TaxDome

I mostly used ClientHub prior to switching and I switched mostly because it was too simplistic and not as secure. The client portal was decent in ClientHub but this one is better. Workflows were great in ClientHub but TaxDome has the potential to be even better.

Switched From

Karbon

Reasons for Switching to TaxDome

All three of the softwares I had been evaluating prior to finding TaxDome each had some of the features I wanted but none of them had them all. Ultimately Karbon was too complex and time consuming to setup for my small accounting firm, Client Hub was too simplistic and not secure enough, and Canopy was geared more toward Tax only rather than both tax and accounting/bookkeeping.

Pros

I love the ease of use for the client and the available app. I've practiced using it as a client and it is so easy to sign up, activate and upload documents and information. I have also utilized the onboarding on several occasions and have been very pleased. It's been easy to schedule a session and everyone I spoke to has been extremely knowledgeable and patient.

Cons

Creating the pipelines and understanding the relationships between tasks, templates, automations, etc has been challenging and will be time consuming to fully customize, but I feel it will be worth it in the long run.

Pros

That it is designed specifically for tax practices

Cons

There is so much to learn and knowing exactly where to start is a real challenge. The fact that you have only one option to automate in bulk (upon uploading the customer list during import) is a scary process. If something goes wrong, I have a lot of unhappy clients. If I don't make the decision at the beginning, there's no option to do in bulk later. This does not seem practical for a new user. Bulk functions should be available at any time in the process.

Pros

Coming from a quagmire of administrative staff, spreadsheets, and various software to manage our practice, TaxDome is an absolute godsend. We've only had the opportunity to work with it for a couple of weeks during the trial period, but we have been impressed with it beyond our expectations. We really like the variety of tools that made the import of contacts/docs expedient and reliable. The email sync feature is just amazing as it eliminates the noise of a junked-up inbox. The mobile app with built-in document scanner is so incredibly neat that I think our clients will easily get on-board with these changes in how we interact with them. I would be remiss if I didn't give the customer service team some love as well. I must've bugged them everyday about something. They were prompt, courteous, and helpful with each and every correspondence. Lastly, as we continue to learn the TaxDome platform, we're discovering new functionality we didn't expect but will help immensely. For example, one feature we just found was the ability to edit PDF documents within the TaxDome platform itself. Amazing!

Cons

Honestly, there hasn't been anything that I've experienced in the past 2 weeks that would warrant a complaint of any sort. We would've really liked to have a scheduling module in TaxDome where we can organize and schedule our reviews with clients, but not a deal breaker and as I understand it is in the works anyway.

Pros

Customer support, online videos, and all the resources. I'm a jump-in and get started. I don't want to schedule a demo, I don't want to talk to anyone I just want to get my feet wet. I can quickly determine if I'm going to like something or not. I always learn by playing around with things. I LOVE how I could sign up and then start asking questions and scheduling help once I learned my way around the software.

Automation of workflow. My reason for actually purchasing the software is the automation. I want to save time (eventually) with setting up my system to keep my clients informed every step of the way.

I also love that I can quickly look at my clients and send emails based on where they are in the completion of their projects. I also find the auto-reminders for clients to do something incredibly useful.

Cons

I don't like the projects. My biggest worry is I'm going to miss a project for a client. That just can't happen. The pipeline is taking me time to get used to and I'm trying to remember the point of it. I do think once I get it down it will be VERY helpful. I'm more concerned that I do the same work every year or month or quarter. I just want a way to easily know that every client will at least get on my to-do list with the jobs I need to complete for them.

Alternatives Considered

Financial Cents, Canopy, Jetpack Workflow, ClickUp and Asana

Reasons for Choosing TaxDome

Price for features.

Reasons for Switching to TaxDome

Price, signature requests, reviews from customers, and automation.

Pros

I like most that this software is an all-in-one tool. It is packed with useful features and can streamline the way that an accounting professional runs their firm. The support is also excellent, offering white glove, in person onboarding and well organized manuals. I have also heard from my clients that the client interface is easy to use. They have been more responsive to me on this tool than the tool I was using previously.

Cons

The pros about this tool are almost the cons! There are so many features to unlock and learn about. There are also a few features that need to be added into it (although I see that it is still being devleoped). It needs to have a feature that allows the firm to sign documents as well as the client (rather than using a pasted signature that is easy to forge). It also needs to have more templates for workflows and contracts (or at least better ones). I also think that TaxDome would benefit from a user group in which users can share best practices and templates and tools.

Alternatives Considered

Canopy and Jetpack Workflow

Reasons for Choosing TaxDome

The tools I was using required a lot of manual processes and did not have a streamlined interface. I was also just looking for a practice management tool, and then I came across TaxDome, which does more than just practice management.

Switched From

SmartVault, RightSignature and Trello

Reasons for Switching to TaxDome

TaxDome has more features at a lower cost and was recommended by more of my peers.

Pros

1. Inbox+ is a game changer as far as features go. That's the feature in TaxDome that automatically moves emails from clients to a firm-wide burndown list that allows you to check them off as you resolve items. That means you don't have to spend valuable time in tax season rummaging through your mailbox to sort the client emails out from the sales/junk emails, which is very handy.

2. The immediate copying of email attachments sent by clients into the clients' document field is incredibly helpful. We used to spend so much time shuffling client data from place to place when they would email it to us instead of using our portal. Now it's all automatically there for us to work on when we need to and we can flag particular items that we need the clients to add.

3. The monthly subscription feature is huge as it allows you to add seasonal staff on demand and only pay for them when you need them.

4. The support is exceptional. All of my experiences engaging with TaxDome's staff live (I haven't tried email/chat) have been exceptional. They're well trained and know their product. I have had to spend a lot of time with them (which is free) in order to fully deploy our implementation of TaxDome.

5. TaxDome is continuing to add to their product and innovate. The product lives and evolves from season to season. Many vendors in the tax industry make only tax-change-required updates to their products each season. TD has a well-communicated list of forthcoming priorities.

Cons

1. Integration is somewhat challenging because there isn't API integration with our tax software (CCH's ATX). There is pseudo integration in the form of direct desktop upload and print to TaxDome through a PDF printer (which is handy), but that only allows data to flow in one direction and when manually prompted. That said, the only competitive products that I reviewed that offered API integration were literally ten times the cost.

2. Telephone integration is simply absent from the product. We use ringcentral.com as our telephone provider and what we were accustomed to in our prior CRM was direct integration with RingCentral. That meant that every time a client called or we called a client it was logged in the system and we could attach notes to specific calls about what was discussed (or bill for the time) without separate action on our part (the same way that TaxDome handles Inbox+, which was very handy).

3. There is no good way to manage prospective leads in TaxDome. Interactions are defined as "accounts" (actual clients) and "contacts." Automated processes within the system cannot run on contacts.

4. Good at managing the existing practice, but it's poor at the sales activities that you need to grow.

5. The eSignature interface is somewhat clunky and doesn't compare favorably to non-tax eSignature products. It's just as good as any eSignature product I've ever seen in the tax industry.

Pros

The most that I like is that all tools that I need to effectively manage my tax practice in on a single site

Cons

I have no concerns about the product, except for the fact that it doesn't allow to get independent signatures from married couples filing jointly

Pros

Despite of being a sole practitioner I thought initially many of the functionalities won't be of use to me, although I realized the Pro version emphasizes in automation with workflows and many templates in particular intuit organizer that could save you and your client time as it streamline the communication and organization process. There are other features that are well thought, but conditionally implemented, which lead me to the Cons

Cons

I learned sadly that in TD I can't receive payments without joining the Stripe or CPACharge providers, for an ACH transaction you have to pay a percentage, even if you don't take credit cards. In top of that you can't use the feature to lock the documents to an unpaid invoice for the same reason, you need to join and pay a percentage to a 3rd party payment processor in order to activate this feature. From my view an indirectly way of forcing the user to join and pay a percentage in order to use the functionality.Clearly this defeats the platform's objective since it is marketed and designed for automation to minimize the admin work and some of these cool features are conditional, thus you can't automate these unless you comply.

Pros

The integrated and customizable organizers are pretty great. The logic aspect of them means you can make one master organizer to handle all 1040s instead of having to create different ones for different people or new clients vs existing ones. Within this master organizer, only the relevant questions show based on your clients' answers, so they aren't bombarded with 200 questions irrelevant to their tax situations. The automations also have the potential to save a lot of time and take care of client communication that you wouldn't normally do (eg. status updates) but make the client feel more engaged and seen.

Cons

The file uploader on the website is frustrating for clients to use. You should be able to choose the folder you want to upload files into instead of them all going to the root directory automatically. If someone is an above-average computer user, they'll be fine figuring out the extra steps to upload files then select and move them to the correct place, but I'd expect TaxDome to have made this more user-friendly with the goal of the platform being simplicity. It would also be nice to be able to change things like an organizer after it has been deployed to clients, but that cannot be done. If you send another organizer to cover the things missed, it sends another notification and email to the clients. In my experience, if you bombard anyone with multiple emails or notifications, they will inevitably block or ignore them, which then detracts heavily from the system.

Alternatives Considered

Karbon

Pros

Automation of Tax Processes: Tax software can automate the process of calculating taxes, reducing the possibility of errors and saving time.Accuracy: The software uses complex algorithms and built-in tax tables to calculate taxes accurately and ensures compliance with tax laws.Efficient Record Keeping: Tax software helps in keeping records organized and up-to-date, making it easier to access information when required.Cost-effective: Using tax software can save money compared to hiring a tax professional or manual calculation.Time-saving: The automation of tax processes eliminates the need for manual data entry and saves a lot of time compared to traditional methods.Accessibility: Tax software is available online, making it accessible from anywhere, at any time.Improved Decision Making: With accurate tax information readily available, business owners can make informed decisions about their finances.

Cons

Initial Set-Up Costs: Implementing tax software may require an initial investment in terms of hardware, software, and training.Technical Challenges: The software may require technical knowledge and skills to operate, and if not used correctly, it can result in incorrect tax calculations.Limited Customization: The software may not always offer customization options, making it difficult to handle specific tax scenarios.Dependence on Software: The accuracy of tax calculations depends on the software's functionality and database, which may not always be up-to-date with the latest tax laws.Data Security: Storing sensitive financial information on a computer system may pose a security risk, and the software may require additional security measures to protect the data.Limited Support: The software may not always provide adequate support or customer service, which can be an issue if problems arise.Lack of Human Interaction: The software eliminates the need for a tax professional, which can make it difficult to get answers to complex tax questions