Ultratax Latency Slowdowns

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#1
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A couple years ago we had tremendous problems with slow Ultratax response time. We found a solution (see below) by installing a SanDisk IO drive. This worked great until last week, when the board crashed, and now we find this board has been discontinued. Does anyone have a good solution that they use? I am feeling a lot of pressure to move to virtual office, but am concerned about reports of downtime (and the dramatic increase in cost).

Here's the discussion item that describes the problem and the original solution:

Bsquared This person is a Verified Professional Apr 7, 2016 at 10:40 AM

This was a write up by the IT guest speaker at the Thomson user conference.

The UltraTax speed problems with crashing, print preview, the Efile status, and e-filing are usually caused by latency to access the client data files. This is a problem with the server latency and memory or upgrades to the end user desktop should make no difference. On complicated returns especially multistate returns the amount of read and write request goes up exponentially and can cause significant time waiting and the greyed out not responding message. The fix for this is to address server latency.Average drives can have a 30 millisecond latency to return data. SSD’s are faster, but they vary. What we did to improve speed was use a Fusion IO card. These cards speeds are measured in microseconds ( millionths of a second) instead of milliseconds(thousandths of a second) which allows storage latency to approach 0 for all practical purposes. In specific cases of large complicated returns we were able to cut print preview time by 97%. In general though our print preview time is cut about 80%. The case study we did with SanDisk can be found here.https://www.sandisk.com/business/datace ... the-tax-... speed issue is not only in print preview, but also in the electronic filing system. A large return may only be transmitting data to Thomson for seconds, but we and some firms we have worked with have seen e-file sessions that took over an hour. In one specific case we had a transmission that took over 2 hours the previous year and after our upgrade took 12 minutes. All areas of the program see improvement, for example our proformas of over 4000 returns took less than three hours this year for all returns.This applies to the entire CS Suite. File Cabinet speeds increases dramatically. With a 120GB File Cabinet database we had some client data that took 45 minutes to pull up before this upgrade. File Cabinet now runs in real time. There are no delays, and we moved away form a SQL implementation because it runs faster without the SQL database and allows a simpler backup model.The important take away is that most speed issues on the CS Suite can be addressed by fixing latency, not by RAM or processor power at the client end. If you fix the bottle neck at the server end a tablet can give better results than the fastest workstation machine can connected to a server with standard storage.
 

#2
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Honestly, this is nonsense to me. I was running UT on a very robust server with the fastest SSDs available at the time, and the speed still sucked relative to other tax prep software. What took 20 minutes for UT to load or calculate now takes me about 45 seconds in Lacerte. I have saved so much time with Lacerte simply due to how quickly it can calculate/process/transmit returns.

UT and FC happens to be software with a rather large footprint and resource requirements (latency, in this case) and they (TR) want to just blame hardware rather than admit to poor coding...
 

#3
ATSMAN  
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For what Ultra Tax charges there should be no latency slowdowns :roll:

20 minutes to load a return and calculate. I bet other tax prep software does all that in 5 minutes or less :lol:
 

#4
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ATSMAN wrote:For what Ultra Tax charges there should be no latency slowdowns :roll:


It's awful. It is the primary reason I switched away from UT and anything else from TR.

I am actually paying more for Lacerte (but I fully recover the costs by building in surcharges to my tax prep fees), but I am just stunned at how much faster it is. UT has its pros, but efficiency and speed are not two of them. And it CONSTANTLY crashes.
 

#5
cp_acwt  
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Who knows how much longer UT will be around. Onvio is TR's next great idea.
 

#6
jon  
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They are saying FC is being fazed out. Get to Onvio. The last time they fazed it was a great general ledger, TB/ financial statement system to a system that cost more, poor backup - it is tough. What are the comments on Onvio?

Do not understand all of the calculation problems. Multi state can be slow -Lacerte has always been more expensive and they never for years had their own system for accounting that integrated with the tax program unless recently done.
 

#7
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Honestly, all tax programs are heading toward cloud/internet computing. CCH seems to be the leading edge of this and everyone else is just following. There are just too many problems inherent with the workstation computing model that are resolved with the move back to a vendor-maintained mainframe model, even though it creates its own set of problems.

The firm I per diem with is in transition to Onvio. The whole Onvio suite is a work in process -- I'm not exactly pleased with the march of software companies toward being forever in Beta but I understand it.

The Onvio file cabinet feature is simpler than FileCabinet CS is, but you lose the ability to annotate documents, and I don't know if the family organization feature exists yet. The program itself is slower than FileCabinet hosted on Virtual Office, but it's faster and easier to search for a client (for example).

The Onvio Practice replacement is less fully-featured and does not integrate as easily as Practice CS, but it's quite a bit faster. Honestly, from the perspective of the end user it's the least bad practice management program I've used, but I can't speak to the back end. I do miss the integrations, though.

I've never had the same problems with UT that CornerstoneCPA has had, either in my solo practice, or on VirtualOffice. The tax edition of Onvio is being rolled out slowly and deliberately, so there's going to be several years before UT is going to pull the plug on the installed versions of the program.
 

#8
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Our firm started using Onvio for document storage at the end of last year. I agree with the above assessment that it's a work in process. Much of what FileCabinet had seems to be slowly getting added to Onvio. I know our admin staff has had some issues with the Onvio e-signature aspect and various portal issues. Also, we attempted to some clients use the Onvio tax organizer, but it doesn't seem to be at all user friendly so we've given up on using it. We use Adobe Acrobat to mark up PDF tax documents.
 

#9
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jon wrote:Do not understand all of the calculation problems. Multi state can be slow -Lacerte has always been more expensive and they never for years had their own system for accounting that integrated with the tax program unless recently done.


Quickbooks Accountant "integrates" with Lacerte but I have not tried it. I have never found accounting integrations to be that significant of a time saver given I still need to review.
 

#10
jon  
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I am basically a tax practice that gives financials to small business- on a tax basis out. The integration with the accounting system into to Ultra Tax has always been GREAT!!! Quickbooks has always supposed to have a bridge to Ultra we tried it 20 years ago - easier to get information to CS/ACS and have a nice looking financial and transferred easily to UT. I do no think the bridges of other things to UT has been available anymore, but I have not looked in 19 years.
 

#11
Eduardo  
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jon wrote:I am basically a tax practice that gives financials to small business- on a tax basis out. The integration with the accounting system into to Ultra Tax has always been GREAT!!! Quickbooks has always supposed to have a bridge to Ultra we tried it 20 years ago - easier to get information to CS/ACS and have a nice looking financial and transferred easily to UT. I do no think the bridges of other things to UT has been available anymore, but I have not looked in 19 years.


This is what we do - either we update the client QB file and transfer the data to ACS to generate the financials, or my assistant enters the client info into QB Desktop, then we transfer to ACS. Financials look much more professional in ACS. Also use the UT integration - saves a lot of time.
 

#12
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When y'all are talking about latency, are you referring to printing or print previewing a return? That's the only time l ever have to wait for UT. But it's not 20 minutes, it's less than 5 minutes for the biggest return that I prep. I moved back to a one-terminal local installation in my home office from accessing UT from the cloud with TR's NetStaff app, when my former employer gave me the option to clear out and take my pick of clients with me. The local installation is a lot faster than the cloud with the latest hard drive that looks like a RAM chip, though I think part of the speed boost is because I only have 100 clients instead of 1,800 clients in UT.
 

#13
jon  
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Ultra users are you happy with the new alternative to File Cabinet???? I am in my last few years of this business and really do not want CHANGE. I may put on a addition to the house and do some work, I have been not taking on new clients since 2012, and finally have resigned from a few in the last few years. Is Sharefile an alternative to FC???

I was approached by a couple of firms to buy me out, both Lacert, and they said getting FC information out is not easy.
 

#14
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jon wrote:I was approached by a couple of firms to buy me out, both Lacert, and they said getting FC information out is not easy.


Correct, it is a PITA and time consuming. My former partner insisted we use FC and I was so annoyed in transitioning from FC to SmartVault because of how difficult it is to actually get ALL data out of FC in a clean manner.

If I ever buy a firm using TR products, I am going to insist they take on the burden of extracting files into a clean format and file naming convention.
 

#15
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jon wrote:Ultra users are you happy with the new alternative to File Cabinet???? I am in my last few years of this business and really do not want CHANGE. I may put on a addition to the house and do some work, I have been not taking on new clients since 2012, and finally have resigned from a few in the last few years. Is Sharefile an alternative to FC???

I was approached by a couple of firms to buy me out, both Lacert, and they said getting FC information out is not easy.


No, I’m this year was kind of the final straw for me. If I was 10 years older I would wait it out, but I don’t believe Onvio will survive. I have made the jump to Axcess. Conversion is a bit overwhelming at that moment. But the entire platform seems 10 years to the future of Onvio.
 

#16
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Curious for more information the FC being fazed out?
My TR rep is still trying to sell my small firm on FC, and I use it at my day job.
Have not heard anything about it.
-
Back to the topic at hand. UT was getting a little long in the tooth on our old server, but with the new server, and UT installed locally to each machine with SSD's and 16GB ram, etc we seem to be having some decent success. Fewer than 1000 total clients.
I did have quite a bit of trouble with UT doing batch extensions the last couple years, just about had to rebatch every 10-15 clients 2x to get all the e-files to create properly for the extensions. It's gotten to the point that I stop making $$ and just focus on extensions 5-7 days out from the deadline now, just in case.
 

#17
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We had this issue at the CPA firm I used to work at and we ended up getting in touch with Josh Holman (he's the go-to IT expert on this topic and I believe he is who you are referring to) and him and his team were able to increase our speeds exponentially. TR actually refers people to him quite often because he's the best at resolving these issues and their services are very decently priced. He's now at https://www.pinesupport.com/ I would highly recommend requesting a demo and seeing what they can do for you. It was a complete game changer when we used their services.
 


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