TurboTax failed me

I spent the whole morning yesterday in tax-prep pain. Over a year ago, I dropped Quicken for Mac permanently. Intuit simply does not care about Macs, always putting releases far behind Windows, and making them inferior even when released.

Last year, they were changing Quicken BillPay, to force every Quicken user to upgrade by permanently ending backwards compatibility. The kicker was that the current version of Mac Quicken wouldn’t work with the upgraded services for an unknown amount of time. That was the incentive I needed to switch from a company which clearly did not care about me to one that did, MoneyDance.

However, I did my taxes last year with TurboTax, and I had a complex set of carry-forwards related to my adoption of Clio, my youngest daughter. So, despite the bitter taste Intuit had left in my mouth from the Quicken experience, I picked up a copy of Quicken at Costco. I went to install it yesterday on my beautiful Mac G5.

On the first run it crashed

I should have stopped right then. If a company can’t install on a Mac, it is too brain-damaged to do business with. Macs are bone-simple to install for, needing no installer for anything but system level programs. But Intuit managed to crash while applying updates. OK, I tried again and it made it past the updater.

Then TurboTax crashed when I imported last year’s taxes

This was the whole reason for my use of TurboTax this year! I was supposed to be able to import last year’s taxes. No. It would not let me import them. I tried a half-dozen times. I deleted the program and reinstalled. I deleted, emptied the trash and reinstalled. I deleted, emptied the trash, rebooted and closed all other programs on the system. In every case it would endlessly hang on import of my tax file.

Thank the gods that Costco has such a lenient return policy. They took it back without a quibble. I noticed that at least one other person in the return line was returning TurboTax as well.

Then I tried TaxBrain

TaxBrain was impressive, and I would definitely have used them. I started to do so, and had a question which was answered within a minute by a live chat person, for free. Unfortunately, the answer to the question was that they didn’t have the form I needed for my Adoption tax credit (form 8839). With regret, I left that service, which would have been the cheapest, fastest, and had the best interface.

Then I tried TaxCut

HR Block had sent me a free TaxCut CD. It would have been nice for them to include a Mac version. So that was out.

I looked momentarily at the creaky old Windows machine I keep in the office. It is off all the time, and only used to check out how my sites look in IE when I make changes to the layout. Poor thing is 500 Mhz, if I recall correctly. The problem is that I simply do not trust secure things like taxes on Windows machines. They are far too prone to viruses and various other exploits. That and the fact that I do not care to spend the time applying the needed Service Packs and Virus scanners and all the garbage that sucks up so much time for the Windows folks disqualifies my just installing TaxCut on the machine.

Panicking a bit, I looked at Intuit’s TurboTax online for a moment. No, the bitter taste is too strong, plus their service is inordinately expensive, in my opinion. I’d need to spend at least $79 to do what I should have been able to do with the $32 Costco package. Finally, I gave TaxCut Online a shot.

TaxCut Online is slow, and renders very poorly in Firefox 1.5. But, it works, which is the important part. It has my Adoption credit form, and it is much cheaper than Intuit’s service at $39.95.

Technorati Tags: TaxCut, Taxes, Quicken, TurboTax, TaxBrain, Intuit, HRBlock