How to Get the Ultimate Benefits of Filing Taxes with Lacerte Cloud Hosting

Picture this: it’s the second week of April, three staff members need to work on the same complex return simultaneously, and one preparer is traveling. If your Lacerte installation lives on a single office workstation, that scenario ends with missed deadlines or frantic VPN calls that drop mid-calculation. Cloud hosting solves this before it starts.

Lacerte is already the go-to for high-volume, complex returns — K-1 allocations, multi-state filings, AMT calculations. Moving it to a hosted environment means every one of those features runs on a remote desktop session your team reaches from any device, any operating system, anywhere with a browser and an internet connection.

Here is how to extract real value from that setup, step by step.

Understand What You Are Actually Getting

Lacerte cloud hosting — as offered through Intuit’s partnership with Rightworks — is a monthly add-on subscription that stores your data on Rightworks’ servers and streams Lacerte to your device via an encrypted remote desktop session. Intuit provides 80 GB of tax data storage per user, enterprise-level firewall protection, nightly automatic backups, and real-time collaboration at no extra cost beyond the hosting subscription.

This is meaningfully different from a VPN or screen-sharing workaround. Those approaches inherit the latency and instability of your office machine. A properly hosted desktop eliminates VPN latency and dropped connections, which makes a tangible difference when you are running large import jobs or recalculating multi-entity returns. Intuit

Set Up Multi-User Collaboration From Day One

The single biggest time-saver most firms leave on the table is real-time collaboration. Rightworks’ hosting lets multiple preparers work on the same return, using the same data, at the same time. That is not file-locking and checking out — it is genuine concurrent access.

To use this well:

1. Map your workflow first. Decide which staff roles need full access versus read-only. A reviewer and a preparer can occupy the same return simultaneously only if you have defined who is making changes.
2. Use the access controls built into the hosted environment. Your administrator can restrict certain data areas to protect sensitive client information, keeping junior staff out of sections they should not touch.
3. Stop emailing client documents. With all preparers on the same hosted session, there is no reason to send a PDF back and forth. Documents land in one place, visible to the whole authorized team.

For a five-person firm with two senior preparers and three associates, this structure alone can shave meaningful hours off your review cycle during crunch weeks.

Migrate Your Data Without Disrupting Active Returns

Intuit’s onboarding for cloud hosting includes complete data transfer support and personalized onboarding. This matters because the worst time to find a migration problem is mid-March.

Practical steps to make the transition clean:

• Start before busy season. Migrate in November or December when returns are light. Validate that prior-year return data, client files, and firm settings transferred correctly before you need them under deadline pressure.
• Test QuickBooks integration in the hosted environment. Lacerte’s data import from QuickBooks works in the cloud, but confirm your firm’s specific chart-of-accounts mappings carry over cleanly. Running both applications in the same hosted session avoids the storage and performance conflict you would hit on a single local machine.
• Verify backup restoration. Nightly automatic backups are included, but run a test restore on a non-critical client file so you know the process before you ever need it in an emergency.

Work Securely on Any Device, Including Devices You Do Not Own

Because the hosted session runs on Rightworks’ infrastructure, your local machine is essentially a display terminal. Tax data never actually sits on the laptop your preparer brings to a client meeting or uses from home. The session is encrypted end-to-end.

This matters for IRS Publication 4557 compliance (Safeguarding Taxpayer Data). You can allow staff to access Lacerte from personal devices without creating a situation where client data is cached locally on an unmanaged machine. Intuit explicitly supports access from any operating system — Windows, Mac, iOS, Android — without requiring a separate local Lacerte installation.

For firms with remote staff or multiple office locations, this is the practical answer to a security audit question that used to require expensive endpoint management software.

Stop Managing Infrastructure During Tax Season

The least-discussed benefit of cloud hosting is what it removes from your plate. Software updates, server patches, storage capacity planning, backup monitoring — a managed hosting provider handles all of it. During the six weeks before April 15, the last thing a CPA firm needs is a server update triggering a Lacerte licensing issue at 9 PM.

With fully managed hosting, the provider provisions resources, applies updates on a schedule that does not conflict with peak filing periods, and handles recovery if something goes wrong. Your team calls support; they do not call you.

How Sagenext Helps

Sagenext provides fully managed cloud hosting for Lacerte and a range of other tax and accounting applications — including QuickBooks Desktop, Drake, ProSeries, UltraTax, Sage 50, and ATX. The hosting is hands-off for your firm: provisioning, security, automatic backups, and software updates are managed for you.

If your firm runs Lacerte alongside QuickBooks or any other accounting tool, Sagenext can host both in the same environment, which removes the local-storage and performance constraints of running multiple heavy applications on one workstation. Multi-user remote desktop access means your team works from the office, from home, or from a client site without any difference in performance or capability. A free trial is available with no credit card required — useful if you want to test the environment against your actual workload before committing.

Key Takeaways

• Lacerte cloud hosting streams a fully encrypted remote desktop session so tax data never lives on a local device — critical for IRS data-security requirements.
• Real-time collaboration through Rightworks lets multiple preparers work on the same return simultaneously, which compresses review cycles during peak season.
• Intuit includes 80 GB of storage per user, nightly automatic backups, enterprise-level firewall protection, and personalized onboarding in the hosting subscription.
• Migrating before busy season — ideally November or December — gives you time to validate data transfer and test integrations without deadline pressure.
• Fully managed hosting eliminates server maintenance, patch scheduling, and backup monitoring from your firm’s workload during the most demanding months of the year.
• Firms hosting Lacerte alongside QuickBooks or other accounting software avoid the storage and performance bottlenecks of running multiple heavy applications on a single workstation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Lacerte cloud hosting work on a Mac?

Yes. Intuit’s hosted Lacerte runs on any operating system because the application executes on Rightworks’ servers, not on your local machine. Your Mac, Windows laptop, iPad, or Android device accesses the session through an encrypted remote desktop connection. You get the full Lacerte feature set regardless of what hardware you are using locally.

Can two preparers work on the same return at the same time?

Yes — this is one of the clearest advantages over a local install or a VPN setup. Rightworks’ hosting supports real-time collaboration, meaning multiple users can access the same return and the same data simultaneously. Most firms pair this with defined role permissions so only designated staff can make changes while others review.

What happens to my data if I cancel the hosting subscription?

Your underlying Lacerte license and data remain yours. You would need to coordinate a data export before canceling so that prior-year return files and client records transfer back to a local environment or a different hosting arrangement. Confirm the export process with your provider before initiating a cancellation during active filing periods.

Is cloud hosting the same as storing files in Dropbox or Google Drive?

No, and the distinction matters for security. Cloud hosting runs the entire Lacerte application on a remote server and streams the interface to your screen. Files never transit through a consumer sync service. Dropbox or Drive file-sharing involves moving actual data files to third-party servers without the application-level encryption and access controls that a purpose-built tax hosting environment provides.

How long does it take to get set up on Lacerte cloud hosting?

Intuit’s hosting includes simple setup with complete data transfer and personalized onboarding support. For most firms, the technical migration is straightforward. Budget additional time before the first busy season to validate that integrations — particularly any QuickBooks data imports — work correctly in the hosted environment. Starting the process in fall gives you a comfortable runway. Drake Tax Software Hosting Vs On Premise