I’m not very organized, so there’s no chance that I could keep a paper copy of a return around where I could find it. But TurboTax stores that info in the computer, where there are search functions.
I’m also not very good at arithmetic and my handwriting’s terrible- it’s great to know that all the arithmetic will be correct and the return will be legible, unlike if I fill out a paper form by hand.
I was (and to a large extent still am) totally clueless about deductions. But TurboTax found some for me.
The bad thing about TurboTax is how long it always takes to download this year’s updates. And that spyware issue a few years ago makes me a little nervous.
TT helps you with this itself. It also has this supplemental software called It’s Deductible that came with my Deluxe version. Between the two, they will help you find every little thing you can deduct and I think It’s Deductible helps you keep track throughout the year.
TT also integrates with Quicken and can download W-2, banking, and investment information from larger institutions. That part is really helpful for me because it just grabs my E*Trade and banking information and fills it all in and calculates everything.
It wasn’t really spyware. It was rights management, but it was still annoying. And uninstalling TT would not uninstall C-Dilla (the copy protection software, AKA SafeCast). You had to manually uninstall the flipping thing, though there was so much flak that Intuit eventually had to issue an uninstaller for it.
That alone probably would not have turned me permanently off of TurboTax, but the version I downloaded wouldn’t work right in some fundamental fashion that I can’t remember. I think it may have had something to do with schedule D items - it refused to let me fill in more than 4 of them, or something. When their tech support wanted to mail me CD copies of the program, which they assured me would fix the problem, I said “no thanks”, got my money back and bought TaxCut.
Both of them have basically the same features, and TaxCut will import TurboTax’s format for your previous year’s taxes. I would be very surprised if TurboTax didn’t import TaxCut’s. By this time, they’ve both really fine-tuned their “interviews” to shield you from the raw IRS forms and flow through the process nicely for most people. Although I got dumped into a “forms mode” for form 1116 (foreign tax credit).
TT is pretty good. My wife does a schedule C, and it is great for the depreciate, and also for capital loss carryover.
The one negative is that there are a few things not covered by the interview - for instance my wife’s SEP. You can do it by opening the proper form, having it calculate the maximum, and using that, but if you don’t know to do this you’d never know you were losing this deduction.
Before we bought it for the first time, about 6 - 7 years ago, we used an accountant. TT gets all the deductions he did, for a tiny fraction of the cost. I haven’t used the alternatives.
That’s what we did, what ticks me off is that we e-filed the last two years and got our return in less than three weeks. This year we’re filing later and probably won’t see our loan to the government until late May. Nit-picky, but still…