Tax Cycle Software Mac OS (Apple Mac)

Suggestions
21

@asifnana
In my experience the majority of professional tax preparers use PC’s and MS Office/ Office 365.

Those who prefer the MAC world use one of the following for their tax needs:

  1. MAC with Windows emulation
  2. PC for preferred windows apps including — tax, Office, Camtasia, etc
  3. Cloud hosting

Personally I prefer a PC desktop version of tax software. I have added a Server to provide me remote login and ease of switching between desktop, laptop, or replacements of either.

APPS
Currently I support TaxCycle, QB Desktop, QBO, and Xero.
Previously I supported Simply Accounting, Sage 50, and Profile.
As an expert tax preparer on contract I have also used TaxPrep, Dr. Tax, Visual Tax, and CanTax.

DOCUMENT STORAGE
For monthly bookkeeping documents, I use Dext Prepare, formerly Receipt Bank.
For client onboarding and catchup/rescue bookkeeping and tax, I support DropBox, Google Drive, and OneDrive.
For central document storage I use my Server with hard drives in RAID 1 mirroring.
For my main PC desktop workstation with hard drives with RAID 1 mirroring, I store all active files.
For backup I use external drives and cloud backup.

If I were heavy into Graphic Design or Social Media, I would use a MAC.
Currently I use CANVA to create graphics. It is cloud based so my PC is fine.
I am learning Camtasia for video editing. The PC version is better.

I struggle with my Android phone. If I used my phone for video capture I would consider getting an iphone, ipad, and MAC for quick and easy video or image capture and posting.

It is good to be versatile and flexible. I wish I had a much bigger tech budget. I have followed Steve Dotto since he was on TVO with his tech tools and apps evaluation TV show called Dotto Tech. Steve has every tech tool know to man or woman. He was a devoted MAC user. He now prefers Camtasia for PC over the MAC options. Steve uses a variety of tech depending upon his preferred application and environment. If I had a bigger budget I would too.

22

I used to use Profile. My boss still uses it although i think he’s switching. Profile has become more useless year after year. They don’t innovate, they patch. It’s not current and looks the same as it did 26 years ago

23

It’s an interesting subject and no doubt somewhat user-preference-based…but there are few things I think may be universal:

  • Ease of access: likely goes to web-based; often accessible anywhere. However, using RDP/VPN (to remote server) or Remote Desktop Access (Sage 50cloud) reduces this to somewhat moot.

  • Speed of data entry: high-volume bookkeeping environments…desktop is FAR superior as keyboard-only based for the most part; moot for low-volume entry bookkeeping or tax preparation

  • Customizability: neither great; desktop probably has slight edge

  • Ability to use third-party add-ons: edge to web apps, but still clunky and not necessarily great; many long-time accounting users have built our own versions, mostly in Excel and import entries or such as necessary

  • Data control: desktop easily wins; both data and program ALWAYS within my control. Uncertain what happens if Xero (say) disappears…then what?

IMO, these are the critical areas in small business bookkeeping, accounting and tax, and nothing is more important to me than the last one. I need and want PERMANENT access to all my work.

Can’t remember who it was (Profile maybe?) that changed licensing for their new version some years back such that one had to maintain a license to access previous data. That’s when I quit using whatever product it was. That is simply not acceptable to me in any way, shape or form.

As for Mac vs PC? I had a Mac Powerbook years ago as I said…lovely, but not useful to me in my work. But that’s why we have choice. :slight_smile:

1 Like
24

I’ve used ‘Parallel’ for years on my Mac. It basically runs Windows as a file, using a chunk is Mac resources. In ‘coherence’ configuration you really don’t notice which system a program requires. Haven’t experienced the M2 chip scenario yet. Anybody else?

25

Do you have a M1 or m2 chip? how much GB ram does you mac have?

26

@asifnana
Did you end up finding an answer regarding M1/M2 chips and working with taxcycle?

27

It works BUT you need AT LEAST 16 GB RAM at the MINIMUM. If you want it FAST and seemless then you need more.

1 Like
28

I wanted quickly mention I found a totally FREE option called UTM to run windows on mac.
https://mac.getutm.app/

So far I have only tested parallels and it seems to work great.

However, I will give UTM a shot. I suspect it will have a little bit more set up time than parallels but do the job just as well less the cost.