TurboTax ItsDeductible 2004

Rating:
Summary: Very useful for some donations, but slow and unwieldy ...
Review: THE GOOD: If you donate clothing or other physical items to charity, you will find this program indispensable when it comes to calculating IRS-friendly dollar values. Over the summer my wife gave eight bags of clothing to our local Goodwill. Using ItsDeductible 2004 and her detailed receipt, it took me a mere 20 minutes to come up with a value for the hundred plus items in her donation. Additionally ItsDeductible also prompts you for lesser known deductions, like the number of miles you had to drive to drop off your charitable goods (the IRS gives you $.14 per mile).

THE BAD: ItsDeductible's user interface is clunky and unwieldy for cash donations (in the future I will stick to just entering those into a spreadsheet). Also the application takes its dear sweet time to launch and seams to run slowly; more than once I was typing faster than the words were appearing in the application.

THE UGLY: In my experience, tech support on this product is a joke. When I installed the program on my computer, it would not launch and instead gave a ten-digit error code. Looking that code up on the ItsDeductible website gave several possible solutions ... none of which worked. Eventually I called tech support, which was not easy as their hours are 6am to 3pm PST. After putting me on hold for twenty minutes, the tech finally told me that ItsDeductible would not launch if your computer's date format is set to anything other than M/D/YYYY. Arg! The application should have said that rather than give an unintelligible error code!

Overall I would recommend ItsDeductible to anyone who has given clothes, books, or other non-cash items to charity. If your charitable donations are primarily cash, I would recommend using an old-fashioned spreadsheet rather than ItsDeductible due to its inherent flaws.

Rating:
Summary: Peace of Mind
Review: While the software could use a big user interface enhancement, it does the job and pays for itself many times over. If you give a lot of old belongings to charity it is invaluable and the dollar amounts are always more than I used to claim. I'm starting to feel like Clinton with his $10 underwear.

The peace of mind alone is worth $20. It also saves time if you use it year-after-year and give to the same charities. If you do there is no need to research and update their contact and tax info as it is automatically retained from prior years (and of course feeds TurboTax.

Intuit purchased ItsDeductible a couple of years ago. At the time it was already integrated (somewhat) with TurboTax. I'll be interested to see how this year's version is progressing.