TaxCaddy

Where SPbinder faces the reviewer, TaxCaddy faces the taxpayer. The two came from the same company, SurePrep, and are now both sold by Thomson Reuters as parts of one 1040 chain: TaxCaddy collects, 1040SCAN reads, SPbinder holds the workpapers, TaxCaddy delivers. On the client side it is an app on iOS, Android and desktop that replaces the paper organizer. Each taxpayer gets a document request list built from what the firm's tax software already knows about them, so the list is specific rather than generic, and both sides can see what has arrived and what has not. Clients photograph documents with a phone, and TaxCaddy can also pull W-2, 1099 and 1098 forms directly from connected financial institutions rather than waiting for the client to find them. At the other end the finished return goes back through the same app for review and electronic signing, with invoices uploaded as PDFs and paid through Stripe.

One design decision separates it from every firm-branded portal: the account belongs to the taxpayer, not the firm. Clients keep it, keep their prior returns in it indefinitely, and can take it to a different accountant. That is genuinely good for the client and a mixed blessing for a firm that wanted the portal to be a switching cost. It covers 1040 and 1041 work and nothing beyond that, so a firm with meaningful 1065 and 1120-S volume needs a second answer for those clients.

The published detail is thin in the places that decide a purchase. Thomson Reuters lists no price for TaxCaddy at all, only a phone number, so a firm cannot tell whether the unit is per return, per client or per firm without a sales call. The product pages describe signing as IRS-compliant but never spell out how Form 8879 knowledge-based authentication is handled, how many attempts a signer gets, or what the fallback is when a client fails the identity questions, which is the question that matters in March when a signature is blocking an e-file. Security is described only by naming Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services and a Whistic profile. Firms should get all three answers in writing before committing.

SafeSend is the direct comparison and it wins on transparency about signing and on covering entity returns as well as 1040s. Truss and StanfordTax reach the same clients with published pricing and self-serve trials. What TaxCaddy has over all of them is the automatic document retrieval and the fact that it is already wired into UltraTax, GoSystem, Axcess and Lacerte.

Dated is kept, with a caveat: this is not abandoned software, and firms use it heavily every season. The tier reflects that a 2 to 50 firm cannot evaluate or buy it without an enterprise sales cycle, and that its published material has not kept up with competitors who explain their signing and pricing openly.