After reading several reports about Copy-protection on this year's Turbo Tax I searched for an alternative to complete my taxes for 2002. I have seen TaxCut previously over the years and at one point thought it was a Microsoft product but as always reviews drive my spirit to purchase certain products. TurboTax lost this year due to it copy-protective features that prevent a consumer from installing the software on more than one computer. I have several computers at home and work, and I use all of them frequently.

I feel obligated to compare the two in this review due to my recent use of TaxCut, which was a big change of pace, since I have used TurboTax for the last 3 years. I was always happy every year and I looked forward to completing my taxes when using TurboTax. TurboTax made doing your own taxes fun! Not only being a fun product, I learned so much about tax code and how to minimize my tax bill.

I can't say the same for TaxCut, my experience this time around seemed laborious. After 2 days I finally completed my taxes and I feel like I worked on a company spread sheet! (we all know how painful that can be!) TaxCut is not very polished and seems "no-frills." One problem is the integration with major banks, financial institutions and major employers. TurboTax seems to anticipate and automatically pulled information from banks, financial institutions and employers. Especially for stock transactions, dividends, and interest accounts. TaxCut is behind the times, you have to manually enter the information hunt around to find where it goes. I ran into a problem when I imported tax information from Microsoft Money. In TaxCut, these entries are there with no explanation. It will mis-place a lot of information and when you try to track a entry you are out of luck. In TurboTax, you could link back to the location in Microsoft Money, and see an itemized detailed view of each entry! You have to be very attentive with TaxCut if you have a complex return. Once again TurboTax seems to anticipate and automate these processes. So TurboTax is vastly superior when when filling out a complex tax return.

Another problem area for TaxCut is stability. Auto-saving should be a "defacto-standard" in tax preparation. Never have I had TurboTax crash and it would automatically auto-save, in the event of a crash. In TaxCut you have to manually tell it to auto-save! I discovered this after nearly completing my return, I wanted to go back to check something and then it crashed. This happened more than once but luckily I saved it manually. You can expect at least one crash per attempt to complete your return.

As you can see I am a little disappointed with TaxCut when compare to TurboTax. TurboTax is definitely the better product, but with features like "product-activation" and copy-protection (which disables your CD-burner and remains on your computer after uninstalling) makes TaxCut the natural choice for power users. But TaxCut comes up short with manual data entry, misplaced data, and stability issues, I can't recommend either TaxCut or TurboTax. What will I do if these products are the same next year?

Bottom line is I would never recommend anything that is unstable or increase the chance of filing a false return which can happen with TaxCut. And I could never recommend a product that limits the consumer in how he could use the product which is the case with TurboTax. I have visited TurboTax's website and they have a download available that will completely remove "spy-ware" and re-enables your CD-burner. Also they have an "explanation of the use" for this year's TurboTax which isn't all that bad if you don't mind using the software on one computer. It doesn't sound so bad after reading the explanation. After my TaxCut experience, I may consider switching back to TurboTax.



Recommended: No