UltraTax CS

Thomson Reuters will not tell you what UltraTax CS costs. Its own FAQ says pricing is custom and depends on the number of users, the number of returns, and the states and jurisdictions a firm files in, and there is no ladder, no bundle table and no entry price anywhere on the site. What the vendor does publish is form coverage, and it is the broadest in this batch: 1040, 1041, 1120, 1120C, 1120S, 706, 709, 990 and 5500, plus more than 371 electronically fileable state and local returns.

The features that earn the price are the ones that reduce keystrokes across a whole client group rather than inside a single return. Data sharing keyed to tax ID numbers pushes K-1 figures from a completed 1120S, 1065 or 1041 into the linked individual return without manual linking. The preparation checklist opens each year with every field that carried an entry last season and has none yet this season, which is a practical way of catching a missing 1099 before review rather than after. Business returns use a single-screen apportionment grid, and Schedule C or K-1 income spreads across states through an allocation grid. Depreciation handles multiple methods with automatic asset classification. Preparers can run synchronised views of input, forms, prior-year data and diagnostics across up to four monitors. E-filing goes out through CS Connect, with login verified through the Thomson Reuters Authenticator app.

Two things a buyer should price separately. Scan-and-populate is not in the box: Thomson Reuters sells that as SurePrep 1040SCAN, with SPbinder for the resulting workpapers, and its own claim is that 1040SCAN automates four to seven times as many documents as the alternatives. A firm budgeting for automated document extraction is budgeting a second line item. Deployment is the other gap. The pages accessible without a login describe a CS Connect button on an UltraTax CS toolbar, which is a Windows client, and they do not set out the hosted options or what hosting adds to the bill. Nothing is published about what a conversion from a competitor preserves either, which is where prior-year depreciation and carryforwards go wrong, so that question belongs in writing before a firm commits.

Against CCH Axcess Tax the products compete for the same firm, and the split is broadly cloud-first against suite depth. Against Lacerte the calculation capability is comparable and the difference is which vendor's practice management, document storage and client collaboration tools a firm wants to standardise on, since both are effectively suite decisions rather than tax software decisions. Against Drake Tax, UltraTax offers more entity and multistate depth and no published price at all, where Drake publishes a full ladder from $379.99 to $3,295 unlimited.

Top-pick stands. The form coverage, the multistate grids, the cross-return data sharing and the suite around it make this the strongest fit in the category for a firm whose work is genuinely mixed, and the customer references on the vendor's own site are multi-decade users of exactly that profile. The reservation is real and should be said plainly: a firm cannot compare this against anything on price until it has been through a sales process.