Smartsheet vs. TaxDome

The Smartsheet platform is extremely similar to Microsoft Excel, so if you are familiar with Excel, you will pick Smartsheet up quickly. Even if you aren't Smartsheet has a relatively simple user interface, meaning just about anyone can learn it. One thing to note is that the interface is that some may consider the interface so simple that they feel the need to look for more robust platforms. If you have a small to medium project that needs to be manages in a central hub, Smartsheet would be a great fit. If you have a very large project, I might consider looking into more advanced platforms.

Incentivized

This is a great resource for tax firms with hundreds of clients.

Money wise however, this probably is not economically feasible for firms with only 1-2 tax preparers. It requires a lot of time and energy to build to really be fully operational.

Incentivized

• The easy to use dashboard has enabled us get comprehensive view of projects across the entire business.
• It has streamlined internal communication with ease of sharing information across different teams.
• Smartsheet automates our workflows, enhances collaboration and ensures there are no data silos.
• I like that it saves time for us and ensures we spend less time switching between apps.

Incentivized

• Distinguish between accounts and mere contacts (for us, this is crucial in discriminating between retained clients and prospects who haven't onboarded with us).
• Provides an editable PDF function
• Offers buildable organizers and templates
• Highly customizable pipelines that automate processes

Incentivized

• Smartsheet set up is similar to Excel, yet when you upload an Excel file, things like conditional formatting are lost. Smartsheet has its own conditional formatting, and you have to reinstate the rules. It would be great if those would apply automatically once a file is uploaded
• Some Smartsheet management and access rules can take some tweaking to work properly. This may be a case of offering more info to admins so they can apply these better and with more efficiency

Incentivized

• Chat function - would prefer a pop-out window; limited overall function (only just got emojis, "enter" does not send the message)
• Contact info is not embedded into the default account page, would like to see this first thing (since we use TaxDome in part as a CRM)
• For large client databases, the search function is somewhat slow

Incentivized

Smartsheet has made my work life easier. Reduced my email significantly. Smartsheet and SaneBox have got me leaving the office with 0... Yes 0 emails in my inbox. My inbox would reach 150-250 email per day. Smartsheet brought that number down significantly and SaneBox took it the rest of the way. Do yourself a favor and check out SaneBox, too.

Smartsheet is very easy to learn. However, while I have been able to pick it easily, Microsoft Excel and Project super users that I have trained on Smartsheet get bogged down in the differences and can find it frustrating. Explaining the differences ahead of time and why Smartsheet is being chosen instead of a different software seems to counteract those reactions

Incentivized

Very easy to use and generally pretty customizable to suit our company's unique needs. We haven't gotten to the stage yet where we're able to test it out on our clients, but the expectation is that the interface should be user-friendly and actually better than what we were using before (SmartVault).

Incentivized

They're a smaller company but they've always given great service when we rarely need to reach out. Pretty good online content but a bigger user base would help to produce more content in a self-sufficient community much as we see with Salesforce. To be fair we haven't needed their direct customer support very often. The sales guys are nice and not too pushy!

Incentivized

Work with the Smartsheet support team to get the best overall. If no one in your organization has used Smartsheet before, the support team will get things started. We had a couple of people who had used this product before and it was a great help in getting our framework together how we wanted to use it.

Smartsheet is a dedicated project management tool that is built on spread sheet principles. When compared to Microsoft's own offering, Smartsheet came out on top in some areas like dedicated project management features vs having to build custom features to Microsoft 365. However when you compare them on price, Microsoft 365 definitely has more value than Smartsheet.

Incentivized

Compared to Insightly in particular, TaxDome far exceeds the capability of Insightly for two main reasons: 1) Insightly is a CRM only and does not offer the multitude of other capacities such as a client portal and forms. 2) TaxDome is specifically built for tax firms and has many customized options that are extremely well suited for our particular needs, as well as tax form templates for us to use.

Incentivized

• Our positive ROI has decreased the overall cost in project management as it reduced the amount of MS project licenses we needed.
• We have also seen a positive ROI on using the cloud storage and it automatically supports proper version control.

Incentivized

• Saves money and time. The pipelines help automate many of our processes that we had to do manually.
• Offers all-in-one (almost) hub. This also saves major time caused by jumping from app to app.
• Again with time-saving and efficiency... Allows us to have both a client-facing portal and an internal portal so we don't have to switch back and forth between systems.

Incentivized