Intuit recently introduced ProLine Tax Import, an add-on to the ProLine Portfolio of Products, designed to enable tax professionals to import tax data from scanned source documents and digitally download data from financial institutions directly into Intuit's Lacerte and ProSeries.

As a result, ProLine Tax Import alleviates the tedious task of manual data entry by securely and reliably automating the process of populating tax returns, according to the company.

"Our goal is to provide products and services that streamline the workflow and increase productivity so that tax and accounting professionals can concentrate on growing their practices," said Jill Ward, senior vice president and general manager of the Intuit Accounting Professionals Division.

"Recognizing that our customers spend significant amounts of time entering data and correcting errors, we have been focused on delivering Tax Import, a solution that embodies our industry vision that professional tax preparers will never have to enter data when preparing a return. Tax Import brings us one step closer to that vision with its ability to seamlessly integrate with the tax offerings in our Intuit ProLine Portfolio of professional products and services," Ward said.

Professionals can visit www.taximport.com to learn more about ProLine Tax Import. A free trial of ProLine Tax Import was to be made available earlier this month for Intuit Lacerte Tax customers and later in the year for ProSeries users.

"I have a client who is a day trader," said Shelley Rodriguez, a beta product user. "He had over 500 stock transactions. It would usually take me about 6 hours to input his data onto the Schedule D. [ProLineTax Import] literally saved me 5 hours and 50 minutes. It brought the data over perfectly."

Tax Import uses two technologies to populate a return. The first technology reads clients' data from scanned source documents and imports it into Lacerte and ProSeries. Tax professionals first scan the documents, send the file to Intuit for processing, and then import the data into the tax return. ProLine Tax Import includes data from a variety of documents, including consolidated brokerage statements, W-2s, 1099s, and Schedule K-1s, according to the company.

The second ProLine Tax Import technology downloads tax data directly from financial institutions into Lacerte and ProSeries. Intuit's direct data feed technology distinguishes ProLine Tax Import from all other offerings in the market, the company stated. Once the client approves the transfer of data to the tax preparer, this technology downloads data directly from financial institutions through a secure Web site to Intuit professional tax applications. Currently, the following financial institutions are supported by this product: Bank of America, Charles Schwab, E*Trade, Edward Jones, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley, Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, Scottrade, TD Ameritrade, and UBS.

ProLine Tax Import's data security is reinforced with the highest industry standards and all data is sent directly to Intuit. Intuit also uses 128-bit data encryption. The data sent to Intuit is never handled by humans during normal processing, and it never leaves the United States.