Customer Reviews

TaxCut Platinum 2002

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I was a hard core Turbotax fan for many years, this year because of the TurboTaxs' product activation I chose to buy Taxcut and 'lo and behold it was every bit as easy as TurboTax. My Hats off to the Taxcut crew. I found the deduction finder useful and not laborious and the wizards we're easy to use. The feature I liked the most was being able to exit out of the wizard and enter in values where needed without having to "completely" exit the wizard (as is the case with TurboTax)"

I used TurboTax since 1989, but I switched to TaxCut after Intuit initiated their draconian license activation complete with spyware! I will never use TurboTax again. TaxCut is just as good.

TaxCut Platinum is fine if you are doing a relatively simple return and don't need too much help.

I bought TaxCut Platinum based upon recommendations to avoid TurboTax due to privacy issues. I have used TurboTax for the past several years. I will be going back to it this year.

While preparing my daughter's very simple return, with itemized deductions, I had a couple of questions during the interview process. Mostly, I was seeking definitions of the terms in the interview questions. The help files didn't even provide detailed explanations of the questions asked in the interview. There was also no help available from any on-disk books except for the IRS's own instructions. TurboTax Deluxe, by contrast, includes Money Magazine's Income Tax Handbook as well as other useful help.

TaxCut Platinum also does not provide for supporting worksheets to enter data. TurboTax, however, allows you to itemize each vehicle's property tax (for example) on a worksheet. Then TurboTax uses the total for the IRS form. The worksheets print for you alone and are not submitted to the IRS. This is a very helpful way to keep itemized records of individual expenditures without writing each one down separately, but it isn't available from TaxCut Platinum.

TaxCut Platinum pretends to show your tax owed or refund amount as you go, but even on my daughter's relatively simple return the amount never changed during the data entry. The program apparently was not thoroughly tested, as the text sometimes was not visible, and no amount of scrolling attempts could make it so.

In spite of the on-line registration issues for TurboTax, I will be ordering a copy of it for my return, which involves numerous deductions, depreciation, employee business expenses, and other items that should not be that complicated. After all, I put up with the on-line registration from Microsoft for Windows XP.

I feel that TurboTax is worth the nuisance and minor intrusion. If you don't want to have Intuit know about your computer, buy TaxCut, but don't expect the sophistication from TaxCut that you get from TurboTax.

Being ... off by Intuit's new "protection" system, I decided to try TaxCut this year... Well, now I have a second thought. I ran into so many bugs and inconsistencies in the TaxCut that I am simply scared to submit to the IRS the returns forms generated by it. Examples: 1)It drags a mistake in my address intput from screen to screen even after I corrected it in the address input form. 2) I had to use Google to find the latest update on the H&R' website. 3) It bugged me with request to input the SSN for my "second child" (while I indicated that I have only one). And so on and so forth..
And it still inferior to the TurboTax in terms of functionality and UI convenience. Sometime it seems that this program has been written by the same seasonally hired "tax preparers" who are "working" in the H&R's walk-in offices.

Left that ridiculous TurboTax forever -

TAXCUT is easier & all around BETTER!

I, like others before me, bought this software for the first time due to the bad reviews turbotax was getting over it's registration process. In working on my girlfriends taxes today, I have two major complaints. The most severe being the lack of informative help. I remember turbotax providing so much more help whenever there was a term I didn't understand. This software only includes the IRS instructions and many links to call a tax advisor for explanations. The second problem is the user interface. It was NOT TESTED. There were screens in which the text wasn't completely clear (covered by other text and not scrollable). This is completely unacceptable and I will be buying Turbotax to redo my girlfriends taxes and begin mine. I honestly do not feel that this software was properly tested and wouldn't trust the tax return it spits out.

I switched to TaxCut from TurboTax because reviews said it was as good as TurboTax but without TurboTax's copy protection scheme. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. Entering Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP) transactions was much more difficult than last year's TurboTax. The capital gains wizard was almost no help. The online instructions and help were much less helpful, and the help had a much poorer index.

Overall, I would say TaxCut 2003 is about as good as TurboTax was 2-3 years ago. But it is not nearly as easy to use as TurboTax was last year. As much as I dislike TurboTax's copy protection scheme, I will go back to TurboTax next year.

I had been a user of TurboTax for several years and was very satisfied with the results and ease of use. I had logged on one day to pick up a copy of Turbotax but based upon some of the reviews here I decided to get Taxcut. Big mistake. Taxcut is very buggy and it even locked up when I was first trying to register it online.

I had already calculated my taxes based using my tax info from 2002 and Turbotax deluxe 2001. I figured it should give me a ball park figure since tax laws can't change that much in one year.

At any rate TT estimated I should pay in a small amount. When I entered all the numbers in with Taxcut platinum it showed me as having in pay in almost tens times as much. I re-entered the data several times and it would give me different results but always on the high side. I even completed a brand new form and made sure I had the latest sotware update. It said I had the latest update but still yielded very high info on taxes and it wasn't a consistant number even though my tax info was constant.

Finally after messing around with this for about ten hours I decided I would just uninstall everything and throw the software disk and everything associated with Taxcut in the trash. Hopefully I can wipe this nightmare completely from my memory.

I ordered Turbotax today and I will used that program this year.

Taxcut is not a very user friendly program and in some of the interview questions it was mising a specific line number to get info from. Also, the look and feel of this program is a bit on the edge of being amateur/professional. Very similar to some of the shareware programs you can find where somebody wrote the program from their basement. It may be just a cut above that.

Looking back on some of the reviews of TT the negative on the product had more to do with the activation process rather than how the program performed.

If Taxcut has worked fine for you for years than stick with it but I am never going to touch this program again. I should have know better than to change something that was working fine for me.

I read this years reviews for Turbo Tax and discovered that Turbo Tax was charging $.. more for their Mac Version, which didn't seem fair, so I decided to give Tax Cut a try this year. Big Mistake.

First of all, Tax Cut's Mac State products will not be out till February 28th (you have to really dig deep in their site to discover this). This contradicts other information given by their site and by customer support that indicates it is available now.

Also, at present, the most current (Feb 6th) updated Mac version of the Federal Tax Cut has a bug which prevents you from passing the review (you can not file). The Error indicates you should upgrade to the newest version available mid-January. I just sent this error report in to them last night, so I can only guess when it will be fixed.

Finally, the program is not a nice a product as Turbo Tax is (or at least, as last year's was). The implementation is crude. Video help had decompression problems. But worst of all, every time you double-click a word that you want defined you have to go out to the taxcut.com website to see the result. Please.... How hard would it have been to define these terms within the program? Thank goodness I have a cable modem, always on, connection.

It is really so bad that if my e-mails to TaxCut do not get resolution in a few days, I am going to just eat the cost of this poor product and pay the extra $.. and by this years Turbo Tax for Mac.

I'll update this review and make it more positive if I receive positive resolution, but if I bail, I am going to let this one stand.

I wanted to switch from Turbo Tax to TaxCut because of Intuit's registration process. I purchased but plan to return TaxCut because it dosen't have the "interview" features that Intuit - TurboTax does. TaxCut may work fine for someone who has a couple W-2's and maybe a schedule D. But if you have much more, you'd better get TurboTax. Especially if you want advise and not just a blank tax form - like the 4835 is on TaxCut - no interview.