Rating: 
Summary: BUGGY! Give me TurboTax!
Review: I have used TurboTax for 3 years running, and, due to a favorable review in the Wall Street Journal, I thought I'd try TaxCut Deluxe this year. What a mistake! Not only do I have problems printing, their online help is missing TONS of information (how helpful is that?!). Hard to navigate. The set-up wizard didn't help reconfigure my screen, so windows were cut off. It got the job done (although I still can't print everything -- even their web site's help sucks), but I'll never buy TaxCut again.
Rating: 
Summary: My last year with TaxCut
Review: I have used TaxCut for 4 years, ever since TurboTax decided that customers should be marketed to death with in product ads. This year while I'm paying for a state download, the marketing ads are the only thing that works. My credit card was charged, but no download screen. IE errors when trying to print the reciept, I had to use a Mozilla based HTML reader after saving the email to disk. Why does a email reciept have to be so loaded with HTML ads for nonrelated products that IE creates script errors? I never did get the state download, the web pages never load. I can't ask for help, no email address ever appears and a telephone call is $10.00. I don't want to go back to Intuit and the endless ads. Now Turbotax is a "maximum marketing" product as well. Calculator - $1.00
Pencil - 10 cents
Forms - free
Not having the pencil crash and the calculator market me - ****** Priceless ******
Rating:
Summary: Errors, and hard work
Review: First, I should say that I am a citizen living overseas, and thus have to fill in forms 2555 and 1116 and so forth. Taxcut includes these forms, but offers little guidance on filling them in. It would be just as easy using a pen and paper. Worse still, although it happily excludes by foreign income, it refuses to acknowledge the existence of non-US earned income on 1040, so I had to manually enter that too. Second, I imported capital gains data from Quicken. Oh dear! One transaction was repeated six times in Taxcut. And, when you deleted one of these repetitions, it ALSO deleted another unrelated transaction. In short, I had to do it by hand. In general, despites its own flaws, I'll go back to Turbotax next year. The interview there is more comprehensive and informative, and it seems to have fewer errors.
Rating:
Summary: What a disaster!
Review: We used TaxCut last year with no problem, but after our experience this year, we won't buy it again. We encountered two serious bugs in the program. At one point, TaxCut refused to believe that we now live in a different state from that in which we earned money last year. The other bug miscalculated our taxable earnings in the state we lived in last year. After six days, we still haven't heard back from TaxCut. Fortunately, we've since bought TaxACT, which worked perfectly and cost less.
Rating: 
Summary: Great!
Review: I have been doing my own taxes since 1953 including those for my electrical contracting business. I have taken numerous college level tax courses and at one time was a certified California tax preparer. For me Tax Cut is easy to work with and does it all very nicely with lots of good references. I stopped using Turbo Tax because the company got greedy.
Rating:
Summary: Cut TaxCut
Review: I've used TaxACT for the past three or four years and always had a good experience, but I thought I was missing something by not using the much-hyped TurboTax and TaxCut. So this year I decided to go with TaxCut. I won't make that mistake next year. TaxACT just works better for me. TaxCut's state software offers little in the way of guidance. Basically it seems to say, "Here's the information transferred from your federal return; change it if it's wrong." And it doesn't offer electronic filing for my "state" and many other states, while TaxACT offers e-filing for every state except New Hampshire (at least according to its web site). With TaxCut, I had to try e-filing four times before it finally went through (but not before befuddling me with arcane error messages). I completed my federal return using both software packages, and they both resulted in the same final figure (which I expected given my rather uncomplicated filing). But with TaxACT, it just went smoother and I felt more confident with the final result.
Rating: 
Summary: 4 year user...Company has been bought out....it seems.
Review: This is my fourth year using TaxCut, and my second year since the Company switched hands. I probably won't be using it again for 2004, although it has done the job adequately in previous years. Interview doesn't cover all topics, skips around-leaving the user to have to manually review items and make adjustments. Final check is not thorough with explanations and help file seems to have become ineffective. Seems to be getting worse and worse each year. I will say to the Original Company however...It kicked @$$ while you were in charge!
Rating:
Summary: Poorly Design
Review: If you have to e-file different marriage status for fed and state, you ask for the problem! Badly design and no helpful hint. I used TaxAct last year with no problem! I switch to TaxCut this year because of their rebate price. I am wrong!
Rating:
Summary: More forms to fill out. That's what we REALLY want!
Review: I started using tax preparation software when it came on a single 5-1/4" disk -- version 1.0. It was wonderful. It took much of the hassle out of the process which was:
* fill out a stack of complicated forms
* mail them in to different addresses
* wait a long time for the return of your own money. Now we have rebates:
* fill out a stack of complicated forms
* mail them in to different addresses
* wait a long time for the return of your own money. After using TT forever, and TC last year, my 2003 return is on official government-issue IRS paper forms. It's not that hard. I won't be back until the blockheads at TaxCut or the twits at TurboTax figure out I buy software to reduce my workload, not increase it. Translation: until they sell it at a fair price without rebates.
Rating:
Summary: Worked for me
Review: After using TurboTax for many years, last year I decided to forgo Intuit's TurboTax because of the monitoring software they decided to add to the program (which, as a side note, caused havoc for a friend of mine when he tried to finish up his taxes using TurboTax on April 14--which validated my decision to switch). I found TaxCut to work just as well as TurboTax. Until Intuit makes a big effort to not treat their customers like potential thieves, I'll stick with TaxCut. (four stars just because I don't like to doing taxes, but who does?)
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Addendum: The above review is based on the 2002 version. I've now almost finished this year's taxes using the 2003 version of TaxCut. Unfortunately, this year's program seems like it was rushed to market--the help features are sketchy and require you to manually wade through tax publications instead of linking you directly to the pertinent parts of the IRS pubs like TurboTax does, the TaxCut interview skipped over the education credits section(woe be to those who aren't aware they may be eligible for a Lifetime Learning tax credit--they may miss out), even the "buttons" had ugly stray graphics around them. Next year, I'll consider swallowing my pride and returning to TurboTax if TaxCut doesn't shape up. I lowered the ranking to 3 stars--it got the job done for me, but only because I've learned so much from the TurboTax help features in years past.
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