I’ve had a tougher time buying jeans online. We were done in less than five minutes, and I paid nothing extra. Within seconds, I was e-chatting with Marilyn G., and she pointed me to the right spot on the return. When I had a question about recording tax-exempt interest, I clicked on the help link, and TurboTax offered a choice between a call and an online chat. When I wanted to pose a question to a tax expert, I had to dig around. In the past, I’d found some help links hard to locate and navigate. TurboTax upgraded its assistance features for this year’s tax filing season - a welcome improvement. But TurboTax says it could rise to as much as $74.99, its list price, before April 15. Had I filed with the online version of TurboTax Premier, I would have paid $49.99 for a single federal return - the price as it was discounted at the time. I didn’t have to pay to try it because TurboTax, like H&R Block and TaxAct, doesn’t require online users to pay until they file their returns. Otherwise, the online program looked and worked much the same way as the desktop software. Instead of creating an entry for a single 1099-R, the program created a half-dozen, which I had to combine. I inherited an I.R.A., and the money is invested in about a half-dozen funds. My attempt to transfer our 2011 return failed, and an import from one of the fund companies went awry. The online version of TurboTax, by contrast, didn’t import as much.
#Taxact for mac update
All I had to do was key in details for a few local banks and update the amounts we’d given to charity.
#Taxact for mac software
The software also imported my wife’s W-2 and all of the information on our investments from Vanguard, T. Even the names of the charities we support carried over. All of the unchanged data from 2011 - names, addresses, federal ID numbers, even descriptions of business expenses - popped into the right places on the 2012 forms.
#Taxact for mac download
The download took only a few seconds, as did the import of information from our 2011 return. I downloaded the desktop version of TurboTax Premier for $89.99 - though I learned later that I could have paid $10 less if I’d bought it on CD at my local Staples. If you end up cursing come tax time, the target will be the I.R.S., not your software. Its desktop and online programs make doing taxes as simple as such a time-eating task can be. TurboTax’s maker, Intuit, has its roots in technology, not taxes, and its facility with bits and bytes shows in its wares. A look at each provider’s offerings shows where it excelled and stumbled in preparing my family’s 2012 return. H&R Block promises the most reassuring help - its staff will represent you at no extra charge if you’re audited. TurboTax is the easiest to use, importing lots of financial information with just a few clicks. What you lose in convenience, you gain in control.Įach of the tax preparation programs, whether desktop or online, has strengths and shortcomings. That lets you check entries as you make them, as my wife, a C.P.A., insists upon. And you can more easily jump back and forth between the tax return and the interviews the programs use to gather information. Desktop programs may be costlier and, in some ways, clunkier - you must buy them on CD or download them - but they also offer more flexibility.Ī single purchase, for example, lets you prepare and file multiple returns, as you might want to do if you’re part of a same-sex couple or if you help family members or friends with their taxes.
#Taxact for mac mac
For a decade, I’ve completed our return on my Mac desktop, and I prefer that. They offer the convenience of working on a return from any Internet-connected computer and having that return stored on the software makers’ secure servers.Īfter spending several days running my family’s tax information through Web and desktop offerings, I learned that I’m old-school. Web-based programs - techies call this cloud computing - reside on remote servers that customers access via their browsers. The makers of the better-known tax prep programs - TurboTax, H&R Block at Home and TaxAct - say that many customers, particularly younger ones, prefer Web-based programs to old-fashioned, desktop versions.
0 kommentar(er)
