TurboTax Home & Business Software for PC Review

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I’ve been using turbo tax products to do my personal tax returns and selected family members for many years. I’ve generally liked the products. While expensive, they traditionally have been easily navigable, easy to use in terms of inputting electronically available online financial data, and they were consistent and practical.

This year, I did Federal and Illinois tax returns for my Father-in-law (retired with a pension, some annuities and property taxes) and my son (wage income). These proceeded without mishap.

For the last few years, my tax returns have become increasingly complex as I have added a schedule C (profit or loss from business) sole proprietorship for my music teaching and performing business and done some IRA conversion transactions from regular to Roth. So, I have been using the Turbo Tax Home and Business 2008 product, which I am reviewing here. I usually buy the product from the vendor at a discount because I have accounts at the T. Rowe Price Financial Services company. This year, I got a complementary copy from Viewpoints and Turbo Tax in return for my honest evaluation.. I prefer using the pc product instead of the online product and I did so again this year.

For background, I am credentialed as having passed the CPA exam and I do have some familiarity with taxes. It’s certainly not at the expertise level of a full time tax professional, so I look for a program to make it easier.

On it’s face, Turbo Tax Home and Business 2008 does a lot of things well:
*File import from prior years
*download import from certain financial services companies
           This year, I imported data from T. Rowe Price but import was not available
           from ING Direct.
*import from Quicken personal finance software (I do not use this. I do have Quicken
           but the data I track needs massaging before use in the return)
*identifies the forms I need and populates them based on my input
*user-friendly interface done through questions by topic. It populates the necessary
           forms based on the answers.An interface by form is also available.
*free federal efile whether or not state is used.
*context specific tax help
* tracking of trends from year to year by line item category.
*identifies errors as part of a final review.

I was able to complete my tax return, which included the Schedule C and a Roth IRA conversion on time. However, I am not pleased with this years product. It was much more difficult to use and it was slightly buggy.

For starters, it did input the TRowe Price mutual fund and brokerage data. However, it did not import the cost data on one of the capital gains transactions that I had. I idd get the data online, but spent about an hour trying to locate where within the program to enter it. I could not enter the data directly on the capital gains from without overriding and TT cannot email if a calculated or imported field is overridden. It was much easier to navigate back to the source data fields in prior years. There was always a back link. This year, I had to go through the interview forms and keep going and going and going to locate it. The screen with the imported data did not show up on my list of forms. This was unsuccessful until I found a screen that had all the source data fields which I could then use to input.As I said, it did not import from Ing Direct, but this was no big deal.

Also annoying was the Schedule C interface. It looked and worked great, most of the time, but I made an incorrect entry in a cost of goods sold field and this was cauing the form totals to be incorrect even though the totals on the individual expense interview sections were right. I had to go into the tax form itself to see where the error was. This also took additional time.

Lastly, I was getting some crazy itemized deduction data due to my small Roth conversion. The program was NOT incorrect but it had calculated data based on forms that it had generated without letting me know that they were there and I had to review them. It would have been helpful to have something show up on the interview interface to tell me that I needed to review data in these other forms. this took additional time to figure out.

I did enjoy the look and feel of the interview interface, particularly on the Schedule C. The expense screens I used seemed to look and work great. However, that was mitigated by the time I spent hunting down the error to correct it.

 The mini tax help features, based on topic, were generally good, but the schedule C help was cryptic in spots and difficult to understand.

Federal Efile worked fine. There was a charge for state efile of $19.99. Illinois has free efile but the system was maxxed out last night, so I spent the $19 to get the return over with.

So, on balance, I think I spent too much time chasing down errors because the program no longer back-links to source data, particularly on data imported from financial services companies.

While the interface is lovely, the aggravation and time I spent identifying and chasing down errors causes me concern. It IS a step backwards from prior years. I will use Turbo Tax Home and Business for one more year to see if it is improved but I cannot recommend the program to new users at this time.

Thanks for reading. God bless!