2013 Review of SurePrep 1040SCAN Pro and 1040SCAN Organize

SurePrep — 1040SCAN Pro; 1040SCAN Organize
800-805-8582
www.sureprep.com

From the January 2013 review of Tax Document Automation systems.

Best Fit: Professional firms seeking an automated workpaper solution, who have complex clients, or clients who often have large numbers of source documents, and where there may be multiple professionals involved in preparation, review and final sign-off.

Strengths

• The SPbinder tool has strong features for organizing and annotating PDFs, Word documents, Excel files and Outlook emails
• Multiple options for firms with varying client complexity, allowing them to use 1040SCAN ORGANIZE, 1040SCAN TRADES or 1040SCAN PRO, as necessary
• System allows firm customization to fit its workflow practices
• Fastest turnaround time compared to web-based systems for creating automated PDF workpapers (last tax season, it averaged under 25 minutes)

Potential Limitations

• Multiple options and extensive workflow features are positives, but may require additional time to grow familiar with
• The organized PDF workpapers the system creates are in a proprietary format that does not allow modified using other PDF editing applications, but users can also create a traditional PDF.

SurePrep pretty much invented the space known as tax workflow automation when 10 years ago they started offering tax professionals scan and organize solutions. Since then, the company has expanded its offerings to include automatic population features that work with many popular professional tax systems, as well as U.S.-based tax return outsourcing (with on-staff, credentialed CPAs performing review functions), thereby allowing firms to take on more clients than they can directly manage, but still grow and increase profitability.

SurePrep also offers outsourced tax preparation services where the information from standard documents is verified by human eyes, and the document organization process is taken a few steps further. However, these outsourced services are beyond the scope of this review.

Core Product Functions/Features: 5 Stars

The 1040SCAN system is web-based, allowing users to access the core OCR and data from virtually anywhere and relieving the firm from maintaining system files. SurePrep offers four products in the tax workpaper, workflow and automation area. SPbinder is the core electronic binder and workflow utility, and is designed for organizing electronic workpapers and managing tax preparation processes within a firm. Its features enable creation of annotations, multiple levels of sign-offs, and dynamic workpaper referencing and linking. SPbinder allows users to simply drag and drop files to be organized, and users can have different pages of an Excel spreadsheet placed into different areas of organized file. The system also cross references workpapers with hyperlinks, and offers additional functions not available in Adobe Acrobat. The end products are a set of bookmarked PDF workpapers containing the source documents.

The 1040SCAN ORGANIZE system uses optical character recognition technology to identify the type of forms that have been uploaded by the user, and then uses that to bookmark and organize standard tax documents. The 1040SCAN PRO product is the auto-populate system, allowing the extraction of specific field data from client source documents into supported professional tax systems, and includes tools to ensure accuracy and prevent duplication.

The 1040SCAN TRADES system is focused on finding and extracting capital gain and loss details from client brokerage statements, and then posting them to an Excel spreadsheet and to Schedule D of supported tax software. 1040SCAN TRADES can recognize and extract capital gain and loss detail from more than 325 recognized brokerage statements. The Review Wizard provides a method for verification of the details before populating the data into a client return.

Paperless Workflow: 4.75 Stars