IRC/Multistate Personal and Corporate Income Tax Comparison Smart Charts can compare at a glance the federal and state treatments of items such as net operating losses; pass-through entities; depreciation, state and federal deductions and state and federal credits.

Intuit has chopped off pricing for four Lacerte tax software bundles, instigated, a spokesperson says, by demand from professional preparers and not in any response to competitive price pressures. The bundles, introduced this fall, were designed to help customers with both tax preparation and tax workflow and are estimated to be suited for 70 percent of the Lacerte base.

Microsoft ended an initiative that it appeared to torpedo from the day it hit the market by announcing that it will stop sales of Office Accounting, originally known as Small Business Accounting, on November 16. It marked yet another Microsoft failure in the low-cost financial application market and a sign that even Microsoft can't move a significant share of the market from QuickBooks. Microsoft will support the installed base for five years. Office Accounting had very little visibility in the market over the last two years.