Drake SoftwareReviews of drakesoftware.com

Awful Company and terrible software. Don't you dare make a mistake on pay-per-return or they will refuse to give money back even if they didn't provide the service. Very dishonest, unethical people. They software itself is pretty bad. It would take less time to prepare simple returns on paper because of all their little nuances scattered in all nooks and crannies throughout the software. Their lower prices reflect their quality. Best to stay away and find a tax preparation software that will actually work for you.

DO NOT DOWNLOAD their demo. They "do not have an uninstaller" and simply deleting the files in File Explorer will leave residuals all over your hard drive. Once they know you are not purchasing their software, they come completely unhelpful.

I use right networks billed through Drake, I cancelled my user in May after tax season, I was still billed in June I called right networks and was told that I needed to contact drake as they are the billing agent, after cancelling the user there is a second step to stop billing that I was unaware of, I am a new user to hosting, they refused to refund my lousy $99 even though my 2nd user had no access and could not use the login in June, this is just horrible customer service, I could choose many hosting companies, but chose Drake as I love their tax software, and felt as if they were a reputable company even though they were more expensive then their competitors. I am shocked at their unwillingness to correct the issue, and I will be moving my hosting to another platform.

I switched to Drake Tax 2 years ago after leaving my tax software provider of 15 years due to hefty price increase in 2021. After speaking with Drake Tax sales department in 2021, they assured me that they only have a minimal increase each year or none at all. So here I am 2 years later and they have increased the price by over 25%. When I called my sales rep, he stated that the company (Drake Tax) was purchased by a hedge fund in 2022 and that the price would be significantly increasing each year. It has already increased over $500 putting the final bill over $2000. Aside from the pricing issues, their support is often slow to respond, occasionally rude and multiple times they would promise a return call which I would never receive. Last season there was an issue with their software that miscalculated my clients Estimated Tax Penalties (line 38) and the IRS had to issue a second refund for those clients. It's not exactly fun explaining a software error to my clients. This reflects badly on me and my office. So where does this leave me? Another software conversion? Wasting time and money to convert all clients and train on yet another software program? The Drake sales staff are like used car salesmen. Trust at your peril.

First I have to start off by noting that the end of season survey that was supposed to be available until 5/31/2023 is already unavailable on 5/30/2023 so Drake is not holding true to date promises which is disappointing since I intentionally tried to take that time to compile a thoughtful review. Moving on, I have 7 areas I found where Drake could use some additional development and improvement in their Tax software and related products and services. 1. The Drake Portals or Secure File Pro app is in need of a preparer interface. At a minimum that interface would allow preparers to message with clients with the next desired feature being the ability to access client account set-up and finally showing a listing of documents uploaded even if there is no ability to open or review the documents would be nice. 2. Drake e-Sign pricing needs to become more competitive with other products in the market. For this past filing season it was over-priced compared with the competition and it lacked the option for an unlimited signature event package. 3. The Pay-Per-Return package should allow for the SSN on a return to be updated or modified as this is allowed in the unlimited package. The disallowance of this function simply appears to be used to incentivize preparers to purchase the unlimited package or force preparers to collect payment before services are rendered or incur extra unnecessary costs from clients who decide not to file through the preparer. The fact that the function exists in unlimited packages shows there's no tax authority or data restriction and it's cruel to force preparers into such business operation decisions. 4. Drake Tax could use to incorporate the ability to store payment information in the Pay-Per-Return software to expedite the ability to purchase more returns. Alternatively, Drake could offer a consolidated location for product purchasing as discussed in the next point. 5. For this past season purchasing software, e-sign events, and other options was available in the account website while the Pay-Per-Return software required return purchasing to be done from inside the software. Payment information can be stored in the account website for an expedited purchasing experience while the software is not able to store that information as noted previously. This inconsistency and separated purchasing location is an unnecessary inconvenience and delay for tax preparers and administrators. 6. Perhaps this point is due to my inexperience with the offerings during my first year having my own subscription to the Tax software but it seems help resources lack clarity on when they involve communication with a person compared to searching published materials. It would be nice to have some indication to know when entering a help resource if you'll be connected to a person by entering that resource. 7. Finally malfunctions and bugs in the Tax software should not require a phone call to be reported to the appropriate team. Early in this past season I identified what turned out to be an issue in the software causing a diagnostic error in filing the AZ S-corp return because the software was incorrectly pulling a formatted phone number to a field in the AZ return. While identifying this issue to a chat representative I was told I had to call the support team to get the issue reported as a bug or malfunction because the chat support I was told the chat support team was not allowed to make that report. When I did call the support team, there was nothing more to be done by the phone support representative other than making the report to notify the appropriate team. This lack of permissions for the chat representatives causes an unnecessary delay in getting attention to issues in the software and may even result in some issues never getting reported. I understand there may be a need for representatives to have a requisite skill level for reporting software issues to be resolved but this can still be done through the chat support with the use of escalation within the chat support team. I'm hopeful to see improvement in at least a few of these areas before the next filing season begins as I've already purchased my subscription for next year.

Identified a WY state tax problem and the support team placed a trouble ticket because it could not be explained but I never heard back. I had to send back several WY address returns because Drake refused to accept WY. Additionally....This software is NOT user friendly - I wanted Drake to work!

I cant import data by uploading W2 or 1099 forms. Had an issue with Drake not allowing me to efile return I had already paid for, now that is fixed but I can no longer print anything. Drake acts like it is going thru the process of creating a pdf but nothing ever shows up. We think we will be using other software for TY2023

Your customer service is phenomenal. I am new to Drake and had some software questions and had to call in a couple times because things weren't making sense. They answered my questions immediately and correctly.