Author's Note: If you were sent here by a search engine, please note that this is a review of TurboTax for the 2000 tax year. For more recent information, see my thoughts on TurboTax Deluxe 2009 here, or H & R Block's Online version of Tax Cut for 2005 here. Otherwise, read on...



It's 11:00 AM on the penultimate day of tax-filing season and I've just printed out my tax forms to send to the IRS. That it's the next-to-last day this years is only because I'm out of town tomorrow...

The damage? $518 owed to Sammy this year; an improvement over last year's $1700 or so.

I tried something new this year -- after 12 years of using Intuit's Quicken software to track personal finances around the house [get the message? I'm not new to this], I decided to spring for Turbo-Tax this year and go fully computerized when it comes to doing the taxes.

Here's what I found out:


On the upside:

1) Importing all the information for deductions from my Quicken database was fast and easy. In years past, I'd printed Quicken reports and transferred the numbers by hand, so I saved myself about five minutes (it would have been less, but I have a slow printer!)

2) The interview process in Turbo-Tax is designed to help you find all the deductions to which you're entitled, and to keep you from attempting to deduct expenses that the IRS would disallow. I've done more or less the same complexity of filing for the past ten years or so, and I already knew what deductions are allowable and what aren't. Turbo-Tax didn't find me any new ones; nor did it warn me that anything I was trying to deduct wasn't allowed. It's about the same as reading a Lasser handbook, except faster.

3) The interview process allowed me to fill in all the blanks and do the math in a shorter time than usual; it also allowed me to test the effects of choosing "married filing separately" vs "married filing jointly" very rapidly. I was also able to experiment with the effects of funding Ms scmrak's IRA. For that purpose, the software can be invaluable.

4) The computer does the math -- in the past twenty years or so, the IRS has had to correct my math three times. With luck, it won't be necessary this year.


On the downside:

1) The software doesn't seem to index well -- if you want to go to a specific point in the interview, you must start at the beginning of that section. That's OK with a simple process, but you have to keep clicking like a maniac to get to page nine of, for example, the section on charitable deductions or the sixteenth question in the section on unreimbursed employee business expenses.

2) I wanted to file electronically (why shouldn't I? Intuit promised to rebate my filing fee), but couldn't -- I was required to update the product, and the One-Click Update kept stalling at about 40% of the download. Not just once, mind you, but ten or fifteen times over the past several days. I visited the support site and looked at the FAQs (lots of questions there about the updates) but found no help. I attempted a manual download of the update patch and -- guess what -- it stalled at about 40% of the download (again, not just once but persistently).


Will I do it again next year?

The jury's out on that question. Here's my take on Turbo-Tax:

* It's a waste of money if you're not itemizing deductions.
* It's a waste of money if you have only a very simple set of deductions; such as just charities, property taxes, and mortgage interest.
* It could be indispensable if you have complex income and expenses from self-employment, farming/ranching, or rental property.
* It could save you the cost of the software with just one discovery of a deduction if you're not already tax-savvy.
* It adds a whole new level of complexity to filing your taxes if you're not facile with the software. I lost a number I'd entered only to find it showing up again later in two different spots on the form 1040-A. whoops!
* The electronic filing thing could be a godsend. But the software won't let you perform electronic filing until you've updated the executable, and the update routines don't work. Can you say "catch-22"?

As I said, the jury's still out.


Technical Info:
Compaq 5000-series presario 900mHz machine running Windows ME
56K dialup-modem, Internet Explorer v. 5.5
Turbo-Tax Deluxe for filing year 2000

Recommended: Yes