TaxSlayer Pro

Three packages, one flat price each, no return counter anywhere. Classic is $1,395, Pro Web is $1,595 and Premium is $1,695, and all three include unlimited 1040 preparation, every state and local jurisdiction, and unlimited federal and state electronic filing. There are no per-state modules to buy and no per-return charges to forecast, which is a genuinely different proposition from the pay-per-return and bundle models that dominate this category. Premium is the package that adds the corporate suite, covering forms 706, 709, 990, 1041, 1065, 1120, 1120-S and 5500 with federal and state counterpart e-filing. Classic is individual returns only.

The company traces itself to Rhodes-Murphy & Co., a family tax preparation business founded in Augusta, Georgia in 1965, and the design is built around a particular kind of office. Refund transfer bank products are on the feature list of all three packages, TaxesToGo lets a client start a return and photograph documents from a phone, and the whole product assumes a preparer who is paid out of the refund rather than by invoice. The client retention database, refund estimator and web bank integration point the same way. Pro Web is the browser package, works on macOS, and is the only one available in Spanish, which matters for offices serving Spanish-speaking clients. A CPA firm doing entity work, planning and year-round advisory will find very little here that speaks to it.

The gap that defines this product is between the cloud and the corporate suite. Pro Web is the cloud offering and it is a 1040 program; the comparison table lists corporate tax software for Pro Web as "call for details", and the only clean answer is the Pro Web plus Corporate arrangement where individual returns are prepared in the browser and entity returns in a separate desktop install. That means a firm wanting both cloud access and 1120-S filing runs two programs. TaxSlayer's security page describes enterprise-grade encryption, multi-factor authentication, web application firewalls and continuous compliance audits, but names no SOC 2 report or other third-party certification, so that stays unconfirmed. Nothing is published about scan-and-populate or about what a conversion from a competitor preserves.

Against TaxWise, the closest comparison, TaxSlayer Pro wins on price by a wide margin: $1,695 for unlimited everything against $3,899 for 400 TaxWise returns or $4,249 for 2,500. Against UltimateTax it is more expensive and more self-contained, since UltimateTax is reselling another vendor's engine. Against Drake Tax at $3,295 the difference is depth of support and reputation among CPA firms rather than filing capability.

The inherited dated tier stays, and the reason is architecture rather than neglect. The desktop packages remain the only route to entity returns, the cloud package cannot do them alone, and the two halves are separate programs. For a high-volume individual practice offering refund transfers this is a rational and cheap purchase, and the flat pricing is honestly better than most of the field. For the general accounting firm this directory is written for, the cloud path does not go where the work is.