Our product teams work year-round to build new features and services that will help firms have a successful tax season. This year, CCH Axcess Tax customers will experience faster workflows, improved efficiency and greater support. These enhancements showcase the innovation and collaboration we are able to achieve by working closely with our customers.
Increasing speed to prepare returns
We’ve improved our K-1 import feature that enables firms to export K-1 data from Partnership, S Corporation and Fiduciary returns and easily import it into other returns. You can automatically create the K-1 export files each time you calculate a return or export the data on demand. And if the data in the source return changes, you’ll be prompted to re-import the data into the target return.
We’ve also improved K-1 footnote editing in 1065 returns. You can configure which partners to print footnotes for, with the option to allocate the amount based on profit and loss percentage or the entire amount. Partner-specific footnotes can be created, and ratio allocation is available to specially allocate the entire footnote and/or specific lines of each footnote.
Better K-1 features result in less data entry and fewer headaches for your most complex returns. Our team continues to find innovative new ways to make K-1s more efficient and less time-consuming.
Evolving tax workflows
The new Return Dashboard that we introduced last summer has been helping firms save time by streamlining the tax preparation and review processes. The dashboard gives preparers the information they need to deliver a higher-quality tax return, and provides reviewers with the critical information they need to ensure a return is accurate.
We continue to build on the convenience and ease of the Return Dashboard, with new features to make your job easier. The dashboard now shows how much time has been spent in the return, including active time and total time. This information can help firms manage time and measure value.
We’ve also added a link from the Two-Year Return Comparison summary to the view the full Federal Two-Year Comparison. While the Comparison Summary provides a quick look at common areas of interest, preparers or reviewers may want to take a deeper dive into the comparison to identify potential errors or omissions.
Availability, performance and quality
One benefit of cloud software is simpler maintenance with automatic updates. This tax season, we’ve made updates even faster and more convenient. Our seasonal maintenance windows to release tax forms will be significantly reduced, to just minutes. In the event of a mid-week release, we’ve shifted the maintenance window to midnight Central time to help our customers optimize their working hours. This means less downtime in CCH Axcess and less downtime for our customers.
Elevating communication and support
Transparent communication and responsive support are priorities across our teams. Our new Form Status Release Page helps firms stay informed about the timing of forms releases within our software. This self-service page provides clear and concise status and is simple to search by state and form. Firms can use this self-service tool to help with workload planning, eliminating the need to call customer support for updates.
The new Ask the Community feature enables firms to leverage the power of their peers. Accountants can pose and answer questions with the Tax community about best practices, utilization of Tax software and forms usage. The forum is moderated by Wolters Kluwer Support and Product Management, but the true benefit is from the online community of users.
Lastly, the Tax Talks webinar series is keeping our customers updated on key topics throughout the year. Topics include Schedule K-2 and K-3 updates, Tax Season interviews with key IRS partners, and technology tips from product experts. In addition to the live webinars, on-demand recordings are available.
