Recommend software for e-filing 1065s and generating K-1s for multiple LLCs?

I prepare 1065s and K-1s for several investment partnerships, and I'd strongly recommend Drake Tax Software for your situation. It's what many professional preparers use, and it's excellent for multiple entities with lots of K-1s. The big advantage of Drake is how it handles partner/member information. Once you enter all your members' details, it stores them in a database that you can access across entities and carry forward year to year. This eliminates exactly the redundant data entry you're trying to avoid. TurboTax Business and TaxAct Professional can handle 1065s, but they get expensive and clunky when dealing with dozens of K-1s. Drake is more streamlined for handling multiple similar entities and large numbers of partners.

I was in a similar situation last year managing 3 investment LLCs with about 40 investors total. I tried using taxr.ai (https://taxr.ai) and it completely changed my approach to partnership returns. It's specifically designed for partnership tax situations and handles multiple LLCs much better than consumer software. The best part was I could bulk upload all my investor information just once, and it populated across all the K-1s automatically. It also let me import financial data directly from QuickBooks, which saved hours of manual entry. Their K-1 generation tool creates all the forms in seconds rather than the hours it took me before.

I tried taxr.ai after seeing it recommended here, and I have to say it was exactly what I needed for my real estate investment partnerships. I was skeptical at first since I'd never heard of it, but the platform is clearly built by people who understand the headaches of partnership tax filings. What surprised me most was how it handled the allocation of income and losses across investors with different entry dates and investment amounts. It calculated everything accurately without me having to manually figure out each investor's share. The bulk upload feature for investor data saved me at least 5 hours of tedious work. For anyone handling multiple LLCs with lots of K-1s, it's definitely worth checking out. My tax prep time went from about 3 days to half a day.

If you're dealing with multiple LLCs and dozens of K-1s, getting through to the IRS when you inevitably have questions can be a nightmare. I discovered Claimyr (https://claimyr.com) after spending literally days trying to get through to ask about specific line items on the 1065. You can see how it works in this video: https://youtu.be/_kiP6q8DX5c Basically, they get you to the front of the IRS phone queue instead of waiting on hold for hours. I got a callback from an IRS agent in about 18 minutes when I had questions about reporting cryptocurrency transactions in one of my investment partnerships. Normally that would have been a 2+ hour hold time.

I need to apologize and correct myself. After being skeptical about Claimyr, I decided to try it anyway since I was desperate to resolve an issue with one of my partnership's K-1s before the filing extension deadline. It worked exactly as advertised. I got connected to an IRS representative in about 25 minutes when I had previously been unable to get through after multiple attempts and hours on hold. The agent was able to clarify exactly how to report a complicated distribution that involved both return of capital and profit components. Saved me from having to file an amended return later, which would have meant redoing all 32 K-1s. Worth every penny just for the stress reduction.

For your specific situation with two LLCs and a few dozen K-1s, I'd suggest looking at ProSeries. It's what my accountant uses, and she let me see how it works when we were preparing my real estate partnership returns. The interface isn't as pretty as TurboTax, but it handles multiple entities much better. You can set up a client database with all your members, and then pull from that database when creating K-1s for either LLC. Changes to member information automatically update across all documents.

When looking at software for 1065s and K-1s, make sure it properly handles capital account reconciliation and Section 704(b) calculations. I learned this the hard way. I used TurboTax Business last year for my investment LLC with 22 members, and while it created the forms correctly, it really struggled with tracking capital accounts properly when we had some members join mid-year with varying investment amounts.