At an accounting firm, the busiest week of the year is the worst possible time to discover that UltraTax CS can’t find last year’s clients. Nine times out of ten, nothing is actually lost, the software is just pointed at the wrong folder. Understanding how UltraTax stores and finds data on a network is the difference between a five-minute check and a filing-season emergency.

How UltraTax CS stores data on a network

On a networked install, UltraTax keeps client data in year-specific folders on a shared drive, for example UT23DATA for the 2023 season and UT24DATA for 2024. Each installed year of the software has its own data folder, and every workstation in the office reads from the same share so that whoever opens a client sees the same numbers.

That design is exactly why paths matter. If a workstation’s data location points at the wrong drive letter, or at a local copy instead of the share, that machine quietly works against the wrong data. Thomson Reuters is explicit that networked client data belongs on the shared location, not on a workstation’s C: drive, and not inside a consumer sync folder like Dropbox, which can corrupt live client data.

Checking the data locations

Before the season, verify the paths on the machine (or the server profile) the firm actually uses:

1. Launch UltraTax CS for the year in question and sign in with the firm’s CS Professional Suite credentials.
2. Go to Setup → System Configuration.
3. Open the Data Locations tab.
4. Confirm each path points where it should:
   • UltraTax CS → the shared UT<year>DATA folder for that season.
   • Fixed Assets CS (depreciation) → its own shared folder, normally unchanged year to year.
   • FileCabinet CS → its own drive and path.

If a path is wrong, use Add / Modify Data Location to browse to the correct folder on the network, a mapped drive or a UNC path like \\SERVER\share\folder. Confirm, then save.

The Proforma rollover, and the “Prior Year Clients Not Found” trap

Proforma is the process that rolls a client’s data forward from last year into the new tax year. It depends entirely on knowing where last year’s data lives, and that’s where firms get stung.

1. In the new year’s UltraTax, go to Utilities → Proforma.
2. If the prior-year path is wrong, you’ll get a “Prior Year Clients Not Found” popup. Don’t panic, this is a pathing message, not a data-loss message.
3. Click Change UltraTax CS Location, select the prior year in File Locations, choose the client-data row, and Modify Location to point it at the prior year’s UT<year>DATA folder.
4. When the client list fills with real prior-year clients, the path is correct.

Here’s the important part: confirming the path is IT’s job; running the rollover is the accountant’s. Proforma moves client data forward and can affect how a return starts, that’s a preparer’s decision. Our role is to make sure that when they choose to run it, the software finds exactly the right data. So we verify the path, watch the client list populate, and then stop.

Do this before January, not during

Every one of these checks takes minutes when the office is quiet and turns into a crisis when it isn’t. Ahead of each filing season, a good IT partner verifies the data locations on every workstation and server profile, confirms the prior-year paths for Proforma, and makes sure the network share and its backups are healthy, so the first week of tax season is about returns, not troubleshooting.

If your firm runs UltraTax CS on its own network, that pre-season check is exactly the kind of thing we handle for accounting clients so it never becomes a surprise.