The four packages a small tax practice usually shortlists are Drake Tax, ProSeries, ProConnect Tax and CrossLink, and the comparisons written about them almost all turn on forms coverage, price and how the data entry feels. Those are fair things to compare. But two of the four don't install on your computers at all, one of them will do it either way, and the vendors who run both models publish requirements for them that differ by a factor of thirty. We read what each of the four actually asks for, in their own documentation, and set it out below alongside the configurations they say outright they will not support.
Two of these products come from the same company and sit on opposite sides of the line
ProSeries and ProConnect Tax are both Intuit products, which makes them the cleanest comparison available. ProSeries installs on Windows machines and can run across a small network with a file server. ProConnect Tax installs nowhere. It runs in a browser, and Intuit's requirements list Windows and Mac as equally supported while ruling Linux out.
Put their connection requirements side by side and the whole argument becomes concrete. For a networked ProSeries office, Intuit recommends 100 Mbps on the local network and gives 54 Mbps as the minimum. For ProConnect Tax, the stated requirement is an internet connection of 1.5 Mbps or higher, with 3 Mbps or better recommended. That is a thirtyfold gap.
Those numbers are not measuring the same thing, and that is exactly the point. The 100 Mbps is inside your building, moving whole return files back and forth between a server and the desks. The 3 Mbps is the pipe to the street, moving screens. One of those you buy once, from an electrician. The other arrives monthly, from an internet provider.
What each of the four actually asks for
Taken from each vendor's own published requirements rather than from anybody's review.
| Product | How it deploys | Stated memory floor | What the connection requirement refers to |
|---|---|---|---|
| Drake Tax | Installed. Single machine, dedicated server or peer-to-peer network | 8 GB minimum, 16 GB recommended | Internet, 25 Mbps or faster recommended |
| ProSeries | Installed. Single machine or a dedicated file server | 8 GB, plus 8 GB on the file server | Local network, 100 Mbps recommended and 54 Mbps minimum |
| ProConnect Tax | Browser only, nothing installed | Not stated — a supported browser | Internet, 1.5 Mbps minimum and 3 Mbps recommended |
| CrossLink 1040 | Desktop or Online, both offered | 1 GB, with 1 GB of disk | Not published on the product page |
CrossLink's 1 GB is the number that stops people, and it is worth reading charitably rather than as a boast. A desktop product built for high-volume storefront preparation is a different kind of program from one built around a firm-wide database, and asking less of the hardware is a design choice with real advantages for an office running older machines. It is not a claim that the other three are bloated.
The restrictions tell you more than the minimums do
Every vendor publishes a list of what it will not support, and that list is where the expensive surprises live. Two of these four independently rule out the same thing. Drake states that installing to a network-attached storage device is not supported, and that keeping the data in a cloud storage service such as Google Drive, OneDrive or Dropbox is not supported either. Intuit's ProSeries requirements say network-attached storage isn't supported, and add that terminal server environments aren't supported.
That second one is worth pausing on, because it is not an industry-wide rule. Thomson Reuters publishes explicit guidance for installing UltraTax CS on a terminal server. Intuit rules the same architecture out for ProSeries. Two respectable vendors, the same deployment question, opposite answers — so a practice that standardised on terminal services for one product cannot assume the next one will follow.
A network-attached storage box is the honest, obvious way to give four preparers a shared folder for about two hundred dollars, and it is ruled out by both vendors who mention it. If you are running one today, nothing dramatic happens. You simply have no support entitlement on the day it matters, which in this line of work is a Tuesday in March.
Conversion is the cost that never appears in the comparison
Every one of these vendors will convert your prior-year data from a competitor, and every one of them describes that conversion as straightforward. In our experience it usually is, for simple individual returns. It gets less straightforward in proportion to how much history a return carries — depreciation schedules part-way through their lives, carryforwards, basis in a partnership, anything where this year's number is a function of what a different program calculated four years ago.
None of that is a reason to stay where you are. It is a reason to convert in the quiet part of the year and to check the conversion against a handful of your genuinely complicated returns rather than your simplest ones, which is the natural instinct and tells you nothing. The same applies to the deployment decision underneath it, which we walked through separately in terms of what a tax practice's software asks of its network.
For a firm that lands on an installed product, the requirement that turns into a purchase order is usually the local network rather than the software. 100 Mbps to every desk is a cabling question before it is anything else, and it is the part we get asked to sort out in the autumn.
If you want a second opinion before the licence renews
The point of reading four requirements pages side by side isn't to find the winner. It is to notice that the products disagree about things you assumed were settled — whether a shared drive can be a NAS, whether terminal services are allowed, whether the number that matters is on your LAN or your internet bill. The right package is the one whose answers fit the building you already have, or whose answers you are willing to go and buy. That is the whole test.
If you'd like a hand mapping your current setup against what a package you're considering actually requires, we're glad to look at it with you. It's a short conversation, and a much better time to have it is now rather than in January. Mapping and building these setups is what we do for accounting and tax firms in Miami.
Sources
Drake Tax System Requirements, Drake Software. System requirements for ProSeries and System requirements for ProConnect Tax, Intuit. CrossLink 1040, CrossLink. Terminal server guidelines for CS Professional Suite applications, Thomson Reuters.
