TaxCut 2004 Standard

Rating:
Summary: It's cheap and it works just great!
Review: For the third year in a row (after I quit Quicken/TurboTax because of the C-Dilla debacle) I've used Taxcut. I don't think much has changed, but I don't care, since it meets my needs inexpensively.

It does the familiar Q&A, walking you through your return, and allows you to skip around in case you're waiting for info to file your final return.

I have a pretty complex return...a 10-page Schedule D with many short option sales, and a K-1 from a Canadian oil trust (with foreign taxes and a funky tax shelter reporting form). Taxcut handled the whole shebang last year without a problem (although going through the trades was tedious, even after importing them from MSFT Money). Moreover, I got an amended K-1 on March 30 (thanks a lot!!) and had to file a 1040X amended return...Taxcut handled that with no problems either.

This year I did a pro forma return at the end of December to check the consequences of tax-lot selling...Taxcut ate it right up without a hitch, showing me how I could trim over $10K off this year's bill by selling some stock that tanked. Without doing the pro forma, I'd be making many guesses and assumptions on Excel.

I gave it 5 stars because it's a great value for the money. If you expect this to perform as well as the Premium editions, with all their bells and whistles and free extras, you'll be disappointed. This is a bare-bones product...you get what you pay for. It is *WELL* worth the bargain price, and a must-buy over its more expensive competitor.

I'll be buying the '05 package this December!


Rating:
Summary: TaxCut should be called TaxHIKE!,
Review: Last year, a bug in TaxCut caused by W2 to be entered twice in an e-filed return. Instead of getting a healthy refund, the IRS thought I owed them several thousand dollars in back taxes, penalty, and interest. Speaking of interest, HR Block showed NO interest in helping me with the problem that their bugware caused. It took me several months, several nasty letters from the IRS, and a long stream additional forms (not supported by TaxCut) to get the TaxCut problems straightened out.

I'm giving this product one star only because I can't give it zero. I heartily advise you to do whatever you need to do to avoid this product and this company. Use TurboTax, calculate by hand, or hire a CPA, but do NOT trust TaxCut.

Rating:
Summary: eh, it's alright
Review: This is my third year with taxcut. It works. I avoid Turbotax because of their reported spyware problesm (at least in the past).

Taxcut is a simple program and obviously H&R Block doesn't spend much on programmers. In fact I can't believe they have more than one part-time person on the front-end of it. It does not look professionally done, more like a beta version. Every year I've used it the text has overlaped entry boxes. The information is displayed in an annoyingly small box with a scroll bar. They should just use the whole screen so I don't have to scroll. You could easily forget to scroll and miss boxes you need to fill in. It gets 1.5 stars for appearance and use.

That said, a fairly simple return takes about an hour and only costs $9.99 (Walmart's got you beat Amazon). It's a tax code and at the end of the day I don't need anything pretty.

It does try to sell me more H&R services, but I guess I've grown used to that. Still, it would all go faster without that in the way. And the navigation just isn't great; in fact it might be poor. And it put two icons on my desktop that I had to delete. But it's this or TurboTax.

An aside: For the life of me I can't figure out why I need to buy tax software. The government could save money, trees, errors and time if they'd distribute a free software package. If they write the rules the least they could do is let me download a free program to interpret them.