First time I've used software to file my taxes and I was pleasantly surprised. It did catch things I may have missed and it could calculate different ways of filing so much faster than I could. I will continue to use in the future. The only reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 was that I wish the Plan part of the program pulled in my information and helped me calculate what I should pay in estimated taxes this year.
Pros: Easy to prepare, Maximizes refund, Easy to import documents, Fast
I have been using H&R Block for years. Filing can get somewhat complicated but this program is very user-friendly and breaks things down so you can understand. I am most definitely plan to continue using.
The most difficult part of filing is gathering the data. Once that is accomplished we simply hand over to accountant OR enter it ourselves in a program. When I found out that the accountants were using software to prepare taxes with my data then why couldn't I. At first the software was cumbersome but now, wow. You have refined a very complex tax code to simple questions. It could not be easier.
Good tax assist program. I have been a user of this software since it was called TaxCut. It has a few warts but overall HRB has continued to improve it. It could use a much better HELP facility. It also needs a prompt to establish an "Auto-Save" to protect against loss of the tax file that can occur if your home suffers a power-outage during the tax file preparation process. The 1099 import facility needs to be updated to handle special log-in password characters that are allowed at most financial institutes. Lastly, but not absolutely necessary, it would be nice to have a progress status indicator during the tax software installation.
One of the program's strength is the importing of data to the "State" edition and the automatic updating of the State forms when you make a late change to the Federal forms. Regarding this strength, it would be reassuring if the preparation software would signal that the State forms were being updated each time you were to make a late change to the Federal forms. The changes are occurring because you can see changes to the State AGI and tax values, there just is no reassuring message displayed that the changes are occurring.