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In most sites in Santa Clara county, a full copy of
TaxWise is loaded on each
desktop or laptop. Tax returns are prepared on individual
machines, and files are transferred by floppies for e-file transmission, backup,
or
printing. Since newer laptops do not come with a floppy drive, USB
thumb drives are becoming more common. These standalone TaxWise installations work very well at
sites with a large number of paper returns. No record keeping is required after the
session, issues of data backup and recovery are non existent, and
data does not need to be transferred between machines.
At E-File sites,
each return must be transferred to the transmitting laptop at the end of
the day, or after preparing the return. USB flash drives work well
for this, since the transmitter can back out the data for each
machine onto the same USB flash drive under different directories, and
then transfer them all to the transmitting computer at the same time.
Managing a large number of computers at a site
preparing E-filed returns requires the transmitter to spend a lot of
time after the session getting everything straightened out. In
addition, since updates to TaxWise occur almost weekly,
each computer must be updated almost weekly. |
