BNA Income Tax Planner

Bloomberg Tax sells Income Tax Planner as a calculation engine before anything else, and that is the correct way to read it. It computes federal, state and nonresident income tax automatically, carrying alternative minimum tax, capital gains, phase-outs and carry-overs rather than approximating them, and it projects out to twenty years. Year-end, quarterly and multi-year views sit in the same file. Several what-if scenarios can be laid side by side, so a Roth conversion ladder, an installment sale and a business disposition can be compared on the same client rather than modelled in three separate spreadsheets. Client-facing letters, graphs and reports are prebuilt, and data can be imported from tax preparation software to reduce re-keying, though the product page names no specific package.

This is the tool for the client whose numbers actually move. Multi-state residency, a nonresident allocation, a year with an AMT preference item, a capital account that swings on one transaction. A firm that runs a handful of engagements a year where the projection has to hold up under scrutiny gets something from this that a strategy scorer cannot provide. A firm whose planning work is mostly 1040 clients with W-2 income and a rental will find the depth irrelevant and the setup effort disproportionate.

The weaknesses are commercial rather than mathematical. Nothing is published about price, editions, states covered or which tax software the import supports, and the sale runs through a demo request, which is uncomfortable for a ten-person firm sizing a budget. The interface has never been the selling point, and the output is analyst-grade rather than the branded, plain-language plan that most firms use to justify a planning fee. There is no strategy library, no OCR of a 1040 PDF, and no questionnaire to push data collection out to the client, so somebody in the firm is still assembling the inputs. Worth noting too that Bloomberg Tax's own software products index lists Workpapers, Research, Provision and Fixed Assets and does not surface Income Tax Planner among them, and several of the product's own subpages now return 404. The product page is current and the product is clearly still sold, but that is not the marketing behaviour of a flagship.

Against Intuit Tax Advisor, the comparison is between free and deep. Intuit costs nothing extra with a Lacerte or ProConnect licence, imports the entire return with no scanning, and produces a client report, but it handles the resident state only and does not attempt a twenty-year AMT-aware projection. Bloomberg does exactly that and nothing else. Against Corvee, this is calculation where Corvee is strategy selection, and a firm doing serious planning arguably wants both. Holistiplan is not a comparison at all here, since it reads a return and reports on it rather than projecting forward.

Strong-option is where it stays, on the strength of the calculation coverage and the twenty-year horizon, which nothing else in this batch matches. It does not reach top-pick because the buying process is opaque, the deliverable needs work before a client sees it, and the vendor's own product marketing has visibly moved elsewhere.