Data locations overview

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UltraTax CS provides you and your firm with many locations in which to store, access, and transfer information. The type of information and who has access to that information varies. What follows is a short description of each type of data location, why you and your firm might use it, and links to more information about each type of data location.

Note: Third-party cloud storage services that do not support Microsoft remote desktop services (such as Dropbox) are not supported as active data locations for CS Professional Suite Applications. Using these services for live application or client data can lead to corrupt client data, slow performance, application crashes, and read/write errors. For more information, see Unsupported environments for CS Professional Suite applications.

Firm data location

Generally, most firms maintain office-wide files, such as client documents and invoice pricing, in one location. Although it is not typical, a single firm can add multiple data locations. For example, a firm may want to add a separate data location for each preparer.

For more information, see Adding additional UltraTax CS and depreciation client data locations.

Office share or branch license data locations

If your firm has multiple offices running the same installation of UltraTax CS or has multiple firms in the same office running the same installation of UltraTax CS with an office share licensing agreement, we recommend that you add additional offices via Setup > Office Configuration so that each office can maintain its own files, such as client documents and invoice pricing.

For more information, see Office share and branch licensing, Specifying which firm data location you will use, and Adding additional UltraTax CS and depreciation client data locations.

Personal data location

You may want to add a personal data location to store client information that is separate from where your firm stores client information for the following reasons: your firm creates a data location for each preparer or you need to create experimental data that you want to keep separate from actual client data.

For more information, see Specifying a personal data location and Switching between firm and personal data locations.

Integrated application data locations/data paths

When your firm sets data locations/data paths in UltraTax CS and in other CS Professional Suite applications, it enables UltraTax CS to transfer client data among the various applications. To change the location of current-year client data, to proforma data and/or customized documents from last year's application, and/or to import data into or export data from any integrated application (such as FileCabinet CS or Planner CS), you need to update the paths to those data locations in UltraTax CS so that UltraTax CS can locate the relevant files.

For more information, see Specifying client data and integrated application file locations.

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