Intuit® ProConnect™ Tax Online Customer Profile: Jackie Meyer

Meet Jackie Meyer, CPA, owner of Meyer Tax Consulting, LLC, in Southlake, Texas (a suburb of Dallas). Here’s a snapshot of Jackie’s practice:

By the Numbers:

Intuit® ProConnect™ Tax Online customer since: 2012

Employees: 5

Returns per year: 150

Started practice: 2010

Expertise:

Executives, including small business owners or CEOs of large companies

Jackie’s Story:

I knew early on that I wanted to be an entrepreneur and own my own business as an accountant. I absolutely loved playing detective and thrived in a field from which most shy away. The constant mental challenge and appreciation from clients hooked me, along with the idea of controlling my own destiny.

In 2010, at age 27, I decided to pursue that innate drive as an entrepreneur and started my own firm. Holding myself to my own standards, versus living for someone else’s, is liberating, although instead of having one boss, I technically have about 150 by being accountable to every client. That’s more weight on my shoulders than I ever anticipated.

I love being able to find apps to make us more efficient each day, but there are growing pains, as my staff grew to eight last year. ProConnect Tax Online’s ease of access, no server and price point per return really drove me to choose the product.

I had used the three main competing products over the years, ProConnect Lacerte® and ProSeries®, as well as CCH ProSystem fx Tax. Once I tested ProConnect Tax Online and realized it could do just as well with technical tax concepts as any of the others, I jumped in and never looked back. Even though I had used CCH for two years, the price the company gave me to use the software for my own firm was horrendous, and I had to have a dedicated laptop for other staff to log in remotely to access the software. In addition, constant backups of the data were a nightmare.

It just didn’t jive with growing my firm’s needs, so I was on the search for a web-based tax software platform, and ProConnect Tax Online was free to try. I wanted to be on the next great thing technology wise, and I could tell Intuit was on the cutting edge.

ProConnect Tax Online helps me keep my practice completely paperless by producing PDF returns, providing those returns for electronic signature and collecting organizer data online from the client – this saves me a lot of time! There was no initial cost to start my firm, other than a domain name, website hosting fees and my LinkedIn marketing budget. Since I collect retainers upfront for all work, I was already paid by the time I needed to e-file a return and pay for ProConnect Tax Online. I don’t think I would have started my company if I didn’t have the reasonable price point and support of Intuit’s products and innovation. Intuit is a company that understands success cannot come without many, potentially failed, attempts, and gets better with each one. Customer support based locally here in Texas is wonderful, and I can’t live without chat support, although the product was so great this busy season that I didn’t use it once.

I have used ProConnect Tax Online now for almost four years, and there’s still no other professional tax product that is fully web-based. I’ll never switch; I would like to tell my peers to just do it! Why continue the insanity of a clunky expensive server-based system that’s going nowhere? Convert a return, test it, and see for yourself the ease of use and quality.