Customer Reviews

TurboTax Federal + State Home and Business 2006 Win/Mac [OLDER VERSION]

5 star:		(47)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

When working with this package, I find it well written and very solid. It's a well built package to do your taxes.

I used 2005 Premier and it appears that they split that product into 2...Premier for 2006 and 2006 Home and Business. I feel that I need to upgrade to Home and Business for the same functionality that was in Premier last year (Schedule C).

I also found that Win 98 was not supported in the list of OS. Worked last year, but, not supported this year.

All in all - good tax package-make sure you need all the features you purchase. Marketing has made it more difficult this year to find the package you truly need.

I've used TurboTax (or MacInTax in the early days) for over 15 years to do my taxes. Most of those years included some form of business income, requiring a Schedule C to be filed. TurboTax Home and Business is a terrific product, taking you from gathering documents, to educating you about the tax code and recent changes, to data entry, to electronic filing. It's the whole package.

One year, we used an accountant to prepare our taxes, because of a particularly unusual income situation with complicated tax implications. In the amount of time that it took me to write down by hand all the information requested on the accountant's form, I could have typed everything into TurboTax and had my taxes filed. Plus, TurboTax is less than the $250 average tax preparation bill. And that year I really missed the tax education I usually get by going step-by-step through TurboTax, giving me tax saving strategies for the following year.

Faster. Cheaper. Plus tax strategy education. That's why I'm using TurboTax again this year.

This was the first time I have ever done my taxes alone. My precious husband who passed away two years ago always handled that job.....even my business things as a published writer of Women's fiction books. The past two years I had a tax accountant do them. I ended up paying way more taxes than I know I should, plus the big bucks he charged me for his services. I figured I could do that well by myself so bought TurboTax this year. And I DID IT! Once I got all my figures assembled, it was quite easy, especially for a first-timer. Next year is going to be even easier now that I am familiar with the way TurboTax is set up. Thanks, Amazon and TurboTax!
Signed: A Widow in Kansas

If your tax return goes through without a problem, TurboTax might be okay. Yet, if there is a problem, TurboTax's approach to customer service is to give you the run-around ad nauseam until you get the message that TurboTax does not care no matter how serious the situation is. Here is the synopsis of my situation:

I received a letter from IRS recently that it has never received my 2003 tax returns. Of course, I was very surprised and concerned. After some investigation, it turns out that my 2003 returns that I had filed via TurboTax never reached IRS either because of my fault or TurboTax's. So I set out to write a letter to IRS explaining the situation with a hard-copy of my 2003 returns that I printed from my past returns section of TurboTax. The IRS agent told me that I would also need an email/letter from TurboTax stating the date stamp on the initial filing of my return to prove that it was a genuine mistake so that I would hopefully not be charged the approximately $5,400 late penalties that IRS was asking for.

I had five phone conversations (in the past ten days) with TurboTax customer service representatives, each lasting at least two hours (I am documenting the reference numbers below to illustrate my claims). At the end, it became clear to me TurboTax was not willing to give me any documentation on my initial filing, leaving me scratching my head thinking what to do. I am now contacting FTC and BBB, as well as IRS, communicating TurboTax's refusal to help one of its customers.

In short, I had used TurboTax a number of times, but after this experience (seeing how significant the downside is of a possible glitch in the filing system and seeing how TurboTax is not willing to help its customer whatsoever), I have vowed never to use TurboTax or any other Intuit product again.


Aforementioned Reference Numbers
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070214-013263
070214-013429
070214-014753
070214-015133
070221-008866

I have used Turbo Tax for the last 6 or 7 years and have always thought it was okay, better than hunting down the forms and inexpensive. Anyone with a bit of tax knowledge, straight forward situations could use it and it has been handy for certain tax updates.

I had to buy this more expensive version to get both the Schedule C and 1040 info that used to be on the Deluxe. Not only did I pay more (although Amazon was cheaper than the Turbo Tax home site by $20.00),it was not nearly as straight forward to use and did not catch in the error check a couple of descrepancies I had entered.If I was not used to preparing my own taxes I would have missed them. It is useful to pull the prior year forward and be able to compare with the current year's data side by side.

In this version it was also difficult to separate out my 2007 self employment estimated taxes from my projected employee income so I kept getting ridiculous estimated tax deposits. I finally said forget it and figured it out manually.Perhaps the standard home version is easier. This one might have been if I only had self employment but the combo of different kinds of activity threw the software off more than in previous years.I do not need to use the state tax part of the module so have no opinion there.

Turbo certainly puts a lot of energy into selling "extras" though.It's annoying to have to actively keep saying no I don't want something because the default is to buy it. Don't count on any support without paying extra.

If I could I would have given this software 2.5 stars slightly better than 2. I'm not so sure what I'll do next year. Maybe I'll just download forms from the IRS site.

Turbo tax for home and business is a bit pricey, but you can do up to 5 returns according to customer support. The Roth IRA section is either not there or I couldn't find it. Turbo tax is using all the tricks to get you to buy or upgrade on their product choices -- it's a little annoying to have to say no when the program asks if you are using Quicken books to upload, etc, or if you want to use other 3rd party services throughout the process. I recommend going to Turbo Tax website and using the compare grid to see which tax product is the optimal for you. Unfortunately some people probably need to buy multiple tax procucts to accomplish more complex returns, such as trust returns. Also, I like the pdf/print capability -- you can copy your return to a pdf and view it, or print it later. I sent my hardcopy return to the IRS via US Mail, I refuse to pay to have my tax return electronically submitted -- that should be free -- the industry has a lobby on this one. Overall it's a great product, and anyone can confidently do their own taxes with this product.

I used TaxCut for the last three years and bought TurboTax by mistake this year.
I found out that they both do the same thing, and both are easy to use.
I am giving it 4 stars instead of 5 because I did find one glitch in the software which is that even though I entered the Simple IRA contribution under my W2, it did not carry the amount to the 1040 until I manually went to the IRA worksheet and entered the amount there. The reason I found the error is because all my figures were almost identical to last year's figures but the final tax refund was off by a lot from last year's number. I went to TurboTax's support forums and found the answer there. But had I not had my last year's return handy to compare it, I might have lost that big IRA deduction.

This is the first time I have ever used tax preparation software and was delighted at how easy it was to do my taxes. Both State and Federal. The program guides you through what usually "scares me to death" when it comes to taxes. The only reason I tried to use it was I was recruited to do the beta test and wanted to see if it was possible to do my own taxes since I have used an accountant for the past 53 years. I was amazed at how easy this program is to use even if I am 73. Try it, "You will like it.
TMS in indiana

This is sold as a comprehensive tax program for Home AND Business, but it's not. TurboTax authors need to look into what kind of setups comprise most small businesses these days. The only additional business form they include is Schedule C (which is mostly only used by the absolutely smallest businesses out there). Other then that, this is just the same as the basic TurboTax program. If your business is partnership or small corporation, there is nothing here for you. To call this a business program is kind of misleading advertising. I got stung once, but it won't happen again.

Back when Intuit still did MacInTax, it was a pretty good program and I'm not exactly sure why they dropped the support for partnerships & corporate tax returns. It doesn't seem like it would be that big a deal to import these few additional forms.

Unfortunately, if you use a Mac, there are really no other options. If there were, I'd jump ship in a second. What I end up doing is buy the basic TurboTax program (at half the price of Turbotax for Home & Business) for my personal income tax. For business, I still have to get the partnership forms from the IRS and do it the old fashioned way. I can then import the business K-1's into the personal TurboTax (and save a bit of money), but it seems an overly wanky way to do this. If Intuit wants to call this a Business package, they have a long way to go.

Overall, I have no regrets about my purchase of Turbo Tax. It is far cheaper than a professional accountant.

I'm not sure if I really got a ton of value out of the additional functionality in the Home and Business edition. My wife and I each have a Schedule C business, but they are both pretty simple, we keep really good records (just in Excel), and I probably could have just entered the values into a simple Schedule C Worksheet. Again, no complaints, just not sure if it was worth the additional money ($30 or $40, I think).

I did encounter one bug in the product (which may have since been fixed - I did get new updates almost every time I went back in). On the Schedule D worksheet, there was a problem where the Long/Short term gain indicator wasn't saving. Luckily, I caught this, as it defaults to short term and would have made about a $40K difference to me! When I overrode is manually, it worked, but then when I ran Error Check, it said I had 96 errors (it somehow found 8 errors on each of the 12 Cap Gains worksheets). I had somehow created some blank rows on each worksheet and was choking on those.