Are you getting ready to do your taxes, or maybe you have finished them already? Did you use Turbo Tax? If yes, I would love to hear from you below. Did you like the new interface? Did it give you problems? Tell me what you think.
For me, I think this is the worst version of Turbo Tax I have seen to date. As some of you may recall, I used Tax Cut from H&R Block last year because I was fed up with all the bugs in Turbo Tax and Intuit’s lack of support for the Mac. But after years of trying to convince Mac users to switch from Turbo Tax to Tax Cut, H&R Block simply dropped support for their Mac program with NO warning, and NO path for converted users to go back to Turbo Tax. H&R was kind enough to convert Turbo Tax data into their own program to bring you over to them, but when they simply walked away form the Mac platform, they supplied no tool or utility to get Mac users back to Turbo Tax. And Intuit (makers of Turbo Tax) decided that is was not such an important feature of their product to import data from H&R, so no joy for those of us who switched to now get back to Turbo Tax.
So, I spent all weekend reentering my 2004 tax data into Turbo Tax 2004 (last year’s program,) and installed and got ready to do my 2005 taxes on Turbo Tax 2005. OMG!!!! What was Intuit thinking with this new interface? All the things we have all learned to use over the past so many years are GONE, replaced by a totally new way to navigate that THEY decided is better. Seems the users disagree. Don’t take my word for it, look at their forum for “Getting Around In TurboTax” here:
http://forums.turbotax.com/intuit/
Remember how you use to be able to navigate to pages and lists, and then enter those lists to see your data? GONE! Or, there are some “new and improved†navigation tools, but when I asked Intuit how do I navigate to a list like before, I got this as an answer:
“We recommend that you answer the TurboTax Interview questions in order. We designed it that way to make sure we collect all the necessary information to properly prepare your tax return…â€
Hello? Some of us actually go back to alter or change data later. Now, to do that, you can use their navigator to get close, and then you have to walk through a long list of questions you already answered to get to where you want to be. And if the section is the last item in that long list, it takes for ever to get there. And if you try and go “BACK†(using their back button) to that last item after leaving it, it takes you back to the START of the long list of quesiotns, not back one page to where you JUST came from. And of course, this is just one problem. Check out the forum board on Intuit above to see the large number of problems with this software.
Help from Intuit is once again not so great. They have a number you can call, but they tell you if your question is about navigation or use of the program you will be charged a fee to ask the question. Great scam: Make the program very difficult to use, and then charge people to get help. Thier web site says, “A fee of $9.95 may apply to questions about navigation, printing, filing, calculations, and general product usage.” Uh, what is left that is free? Oh! Reporting a bug! Well, they use to charge for that too so this is an improvement. The wait to hold is at least 10 minutes, and the people who answer are NOT familar with the program at all, and will simply read you from the help file anyway.
Email is as useless as ever: A canned answer basically copying the help file was sent in response to my question, with a message saying do not reply to the email as no one will answer. To ‘reply’ to their message, they give me a link back to their generic home page for help, meaning I had to start all over again. No question history, which means you will get the same canned answer from them again. This is not help or support, but I guess most people do not read the help files, so perhaps for some this is help! SIGH!
Once again, Intuit’s help is meaningless or costly. They COMPLETELY redesigned their software, then charge you to get help with it. Go look at their blog boards. There are so many people upset with this software and its interface it is unbelievable. Why is that?
To be fair, there are some cool things in Turbo Tax: While importing Quicken data is still problematic, importing from brokerage accounts directly from the broker is very cool. There are bugs here too (No, say it isn’t so!) but in general, this is a great feature. The Quicken import is not so great. It is not clear when data is imported, and it does not go where expected as usual. For example, even though I had started my schedule C, when it asked for the import data, it started several new schedule C, one each for the income and expense data of my business, even though the data in Quicken is assigned to one class. Do Quicken people and Turbo Tax people ever talk to each other? Are these ever tested? The import feature does now allow you to remove only one imported item at a time, a great feature. You can also import one item at a time as well for replacing imported data if it changes. (For exmaple, if you find an error and want to correct it in Quicken as well, you can remove only THAT imported data, correct in Quicken, export the report and then import only that specific data area again.) This is a great feature.
Strangely, I was a Beta Tester for Turbo Tax. Seems, if you do not try and actually do anything complex, this is a great program, as I do not recall any of these issues when testing. Since the Beta Test was so early though, I simply made up data and did little importing from Quicken as I was not ready for my real taxes. For the simple user with simple taxes, they will probably love the new Turbo Tax. The new interface is slick, I will give it that, and simple usage will never get one caught in these interface loops and navigation errors that trying to navigate the program causes. But now that I am using it for real, I realize that even my own testing at the Beta time was insufficient to see these problems. It is a very complex program, and their new interface does not help the advanced user one bit.
I considered a full review of Turbo Tax for Mac, but I am so tired with it right now I would probably not be kind at all, and there is a lot of good in this program as well! Suffice it to say if you are using your Mac, you have little choice anyway, and this is better than doing it by hand. Just set aside a lot of time and be patient. AND CHECK YOUR RETURN CAREFULLY AFTER IT IS DONE.
For me, I am considering moving it all to my Dell PC next year, and try a few programs on that side. While I am angry at H&R for leaving the Mac behind, it seems that Intuit is leaving us behind in other ways, like support! I am not happy about one more reason to use the PC, but this software is awful, and I am running out of time. The bottom line: Software should be helpful, not make things more difficult.
Your views may vary, so please tell me. Granted, my taxes may be a bit more complex than some, with a business and trading stocks and such, but they are not so complex to cause so many problems. If you have had similar problems, tell us here. We can only hope that Intuit cares what we think and will use the feedback to improve next year. Please, tell me how it worked for you.
SIGH! I am really starting to hate tax time more and more each year. Next year, I hire an accountant.
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