Customer Reviews

TaxCut 2002 Deluxe Filing Edition

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(30)
3 star:		(24)
2 star:		(19)
1 star:		(55)

 

 

I originaly went with Turbotax 4 years ago because it was the premier (not to mention the only one I knew) Tax Software.

I was dissapointed. There customer service was extremely lacking, not offering a 1-800 number for me to call with questions (something some don't care about, but is important to me).

I stuck with it the second year because I wanted to easily import the previous year. Still had problems but stuck it out.

The third year I had to download their state program. They made sure to take my credit card info before I downloaded it. My internet connection was lost, and I had to go through the whole thing all over again. Guess what? That's right- TurboTax billed me TWICE. And, keeping with tradition, they wouldn't give me a 1-800 number. I had to call LONG DISTANCE to get my money back. And when I tried, I got the run around.

Enter year four. I certainly had enough of TurboTax, and went with TaxCut.

I found it immediately WAY better. Not only do they seem to actually treat me well, but everything I had imported well into their program, and it's just as good, and in some ways, better, than TurboTax ever was.

Year five, I go to purchase it again from Amazon. Just out of curiocity I look up TurboTax. All the customers rated it a one star because now they install spyware on your system.

Go figure. Par for the course with this company.

Everyone is starting to realize what I realized last year. Don't go with TurboTax. Maybe some day they'll wake up and actually realize there's this thing called customer service. But until then, get TaxCut. It's a better program anyway!

Purchased TurboTax as I do each year. This year due
to big problems with the Product Activation I returned
TurboTax and purchased TaxCut. Not only did I have no trouble
running the software, it imported all of my data from last
years TurboTax files.

After reading the reviews, I noticed someone gave the following false information regarding Turbotax imports, "The program looks for old *.t01 files regardless of whether or not you select to import TaxCut or TurboTax files."

This is incorrect, if you select to import from 'Turbotax' it looks for a file with a .TAX extension, and only .T01 for taxcut imports. I've sucessfully imported last years Turbotax return with no problems at all.

Overall Taxcut seems excellent, the only downside so far is that you have to pay extra for 'DeductionPro', which helps you work out values for charitable donations.

This will be my 6th year in a row to use TaxCut. In the past I have never had any problems with this software. It is so simple to do your taxes. I even have investment and rental house income and many deductions, it is nice to be able to do my taxes myself without having to pay an accountant. I especially like how easily it is to electronically file my federal and state returns. I recommend this software to all of my family and friends, it hasn't done me wrong yet.

I was ready to buy TurboTax for the 5th year until I realized (1) I didn't get the normal renewal offer from the company for this year's product but, more importantly (2) The reviews all over the net testified to the manufacturer's use of "activation" and installation of spyware. That's when I decided to just say no.

I bought TaxCut and shortly after installation and importation of last year's data (from TurboTax), I was greeted with an interview that makes me feel right at home - it's like TurboTax's interview and I'm glad I made the switch.

Buy Taxcut this year and forget TurboTax.

For the vast majority of taxpayers, (i.e. those that do not own a business), figuring your tax really isn't that hard, even on paper. It is just tedious. For these typical taxpayers, there is no significant difference between TaxCut and TurboTax. Since TaxCut is cheaper, that is what I buy. The program, as always, was fairly simple to use; I just filled in the blanks. Doing my associated state return simply involved hitting "Next" about a dozen times. All the blanks were filled for me. By hand, filling the form takes a couple of hours.

Including installing the software, my taxes were done in a half hour total. After filing my return, I was infomred it was accepted by the IRS in about 15 minutes. Couldn't be easier.

I haven't been entirely happy with TurboTax these last few years, and now that they have crippled their software and bundled persistent spy-ware I have switched to TaxCut. It's better and more user friendly. I wish I would have switched sooner. Shame on you TurboTax.

I switched to TaxCut this year because I am unwilling to put up with TurboTax's "product activation" inconvenience, but I used TT for many years, and also checked out this year's TurboTax (ex-wife's copy) for comparison purposes.

The programs share several annoying flaws:

1. Neither works right on a network, which is nonsense; lots of people have home networks for sharing printers, internet connections, etc., and it is often convenient to do at least some work on one's business computer. In the case of TT, given their piracy paranoia, I presume this is intentional, so lots of people at an office can't share a single copy on a network. What's TaxCut's excuse? TurboTax at least tells you, up front, that they "don't support" use on a network. Tax Cut doesn't (or, if it does, I missed it).

2. The quality and quantity of help and technical support have been going down year by year in TurboTax, whether within the program, by phone, or on their web site. This year, TaxCut is no better, help-wise, than TT (dunno about past years for TC, since, until this year, I was a loyal TurboTax user). Neither is really acceptable this year if you have a problem, and neither is as good as TurboTax was a few years ago. I encountered problems with both programs that I only managed to fix because of people on newsgroups and boards--no thanks to Intuit or Block. At TurboTax, things may be slightly worse, simply because they're having to devote so many resources to dealing with product activation problems. But Tax Cut is no great shakes in the help/tech support areas. And past TurboTax experience suggests that both will only get worse as April 15 gets closer.

3. Both TT and TC are obnoxious about hawking their other programs/services/tie-ins.

I find the TaxCut interview process slightly better designed than TurboTax's, as I didn't have to mindlessly click "no" to inapplicable questions as much with TaxCut as with TurboTax. TaxCut also makes it easier to deal directly with forms. For people who don't know what they're doing, but don't have ultra-simple returns, TurboTax's more mindless approach may be better.

But all in all, the programs are very much alike, to the point that I assume a lot of espionage and comparison is going on between them. I'd give Tax Cut a very slight edge on functionality, and it's considerably cheaper. If you don't object to Intuit's product activation nonsense, I'd still give TaxCut an endge.

Of course, I *do* object, very, very strongly, to TurboTax's product activation nonsense. I find it completely unacceptable, and I will not buy TurboTax, or any other Intuit product, as long as they're using it. Lucky for me, Block doesn't have the nonsense, and is a more-than-acceptable alternative otherwise.

OK I'm another long-time (6 years) TurboTax user that switched to Taxcut. I finished filing my returns yesterday. After reading the reviews for both TurboTax and Taxcut, I almost did my taxes by hand. As it turns out, for me at least, some of the more the ominous Taxcut feedback (the ones with single stars) was mostly hype.

My return is moderately complex, with regular and passive income, capital gains, itemized deductions, carryover losses etc. At the end of the day, Taxcut handled it all fine. Here are some positives that address some of the negative feedback:
1. Imported last year's TurboTax data perfectly. There was one minor glitch in interpreting it, which I'll explain below.
2. Performed two online updates via dialup, one via LAN, they all worked fine
3. Properly handled the carryover loss, which had to be treated differently for Fed and State
4. Interview worked fine - never ran into a question like "please fill in form X"
5. Navigation through fields worked fine with the Tab key and arrows
6. E-filing worked great. Yeah the return got rejected a couple of times because Taxcut didn't ask me to fill in fields that the IRS and FTB wanted, but the error status pointed me right to the problems and I fixed them easily, and re-filed. Never crashed, no "socket warnings", etc. I e-filed via dialup.

The only thing I can think of that might make a difference is alot of people seem to be using the XP OS. I'm using Win 98, and Win 2000. Maybe Taxcut has issues with XP.

Taxcut did what TurboTax made harder this year - I completed the return on my home PC and loaded Taxcut on my work PC only to print it out.

Here are a couple of negatives:
1. The program crashed about 5 or 6 times while completing my return, mostly when I was bouncing around between different sections. While annoying, I never lost data, in fact Taxcut seems to retain data even if you don't save the file manually.
2. When you e-file, you use your last year's AGI as an electronic signature. Taxcut pulled the wrong figure (gross income vs. AGI) from my TurboTax data. I was able to override the field and it worked fine. My return was still rejected because my spouse's AGI didn't match, even though I filed MFJ last year! Taxcut doesn't allow you to specify spouse's AGI in that case, so I had to fake it out and go through as though it was filed separately, override the spouse AGI, and then go back and change the filing status. For some reason, even though the status is MFJ, Taxcut provides a spouse AGI and the IRS checks it. Minor annoyance.

Overall I like Taxcut and would use it again. I also liked TurboTax alot. Not sure what I'm going to do next year. Either program beats doing taxes by hand by a mile.

Following the advice I found here on Amazon.com, I switched from
TurboTax to TaxCut. This was based on the installation of SPY
software by TurboTax- I liked the performance of that product.

A previous review mentioned that TurboTax does not have toll-
free support. Neither does TaxCut. It's a toll number as well.

The main problem I had with TaxCut was in importing information
from Quicken 2002. All the information got there, but it was
not properly separated, the way it had been in TurboTax:

Multiple charitable donations were all lumped together, and the
organization names were not imported- last years were used,
and were all empty except for the top one, where the total
was put.

More important, earning information from two employers was
lumped under one W2. This had implications for excess FICA.
When I called tech support, I was told the obvious- "you have
to enter the information in by hand to two separate W2 forms".
And "we have no plans to fix this". So, that's tech support,
and import compatibility with Quicken, TaxCut style.

In general, navigation from numbers to the sources of those
numbers (forms, worksheets, etc.) is better with TurboTax
than it is with TaxCut.

All that said, it's still worth using a slightly inferior
product if TurboTax is going to insist on installing SpyWare
on my computer.