| | |  | Tax Preparation | Home » » » » TAXCUT 2008 PREMIUM FEDERAL + STATE + EFILE | | | | | | | Description: | | Guidance for all your personal tax situations, from 1040EZ to schedule C. Federal and State forms. Step-by-step interviews guide you through a customized experience relevant to your tax situation. Includes eFile. | | | Features: | |
• TaxCut includes up to 5 free federal e-files and H&R Block expertise in every version
• Get extra assistance and money-saving advice to maximize deductions; plus, turn your donations into big tax savings with the included DeductionPro
• Receive live tax advice from an H&R Block tax professional via one-on-one phone or e-mail consultation
• Save time and reduce the chance for error by quickly and easily importing last year's tax and financial data from TaxCut, TurboTax, Quicken, Microsoft Money, and H&R Block DeductionPro software, as applicable
• In the event of an audit, receive personal assistance from an IRS-licensed Enrolled Agent with audit representation expertise--not a self-serve Web site or FAQ page
| | | Product Details: | | | Product Length:
| 7.4 inches | | Product Width:
| 5.3 inches | | Product Height:
| 1.5 inches | | Product Weight:
| 0.2 pounds | | Package Length:
| 7.56 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.28 inches | | Package Height:
| 1.81 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.2 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 322 reviews |
| | | System Requirements: | | | Platform:
| Windows Vista / Windows 2000 / Windows XP / Mac OS X | | Media:
| CD-ROM | | Item Quantity:
| 1 |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
 ( 322 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
316 of 324 found the following review helpful:
 New to TaxCut, Pleased with it So FarDec 01, 2008
By W. E. Damon
"MacGuy"
I switched from TurboTax to TaxCut this year primarily due to Intuit's new pricing structure where they both raised the base price quite a bit and then they charge $9.95 for each additional return you want to prepare beyond the first one. Given those changes, it was time to try something else.
So far I am very pleased with TaxCut. It imported my TurboTax data from last year without any problems at all. It also will import data from Quicken, though I don't use that option.
It is a different interface and takes a little getting used to, but then TurboTax's interface changes every year also so with either product one is going to have to adjust to some new interface quirks.
Of course, it is pretty early to be running software, since the IRS is still finalizing things for 2008, and such things as the Alternative Minimum Tax haven't been nailed down, but TaxCut still did a very good job helping me see where I was going to come out on my taxes for 2008. And that includes my schedule C for a consulting business. Obviously, there will be a bunch of updates in a few weeks, but that is to be expected from any Tax Software at this stage.
TaxCut also did a nice job helping me plan for 2009 taxes as well. I had already done some planning using a Numbers Spreadsheet on the Macintosh and so I could tell whether TaxCut was pretty accurate. It was.
Overall, for those who are thinking about switching to TaxCut this year from TurboTax, my take is that I found it easy to do.
98 of 105 found the following review helpful:
good tax program, meets the needs so farDec 07, 2008
By CS
UPDATE 1/24/09:
I am still very satisfied with this product. So far I've entered all my data, and it's been pretty painless, both for Fed & State taxes.
I have to qualify this by saying that my taxes are pretty simple this year, with no AMT, no sch C, no sch K, etc. So I'm not really running into some areas that are often not handled well in tax software.
One thing I liked better than turbo tax was the simpler handling of tax-exempt income, splitting the in-state vs. out-of-state portions. Also, similarly, the handling of US Treasury interest (tax-exempt for state tax). Turbo Tax makes you enter separate 1099s for each part, instead of just capturing the information within one form dialog.
On the other side, I have some additional critiques:
(1) no ability to import/download W2 & 1099 data (not that I found, anyway)
(2) form 1116 has to be filled out manually, even if it's pretty straightforward -- they could have and should have provided an interview for this
(3) no way provided to simply delete a line in a form (minor point, turbo tax has this, and I find it very useful) -- you can of course delete the data in the line
INITIAL REPORT:
Obviously, it's a bit too early to provide a thorough review of the program, because it's essentially incomplete (as is TurboTax): many tax forms are still not available in their final form. There will be a Dec 11 update, and I expect several others over the next couple of months. (I've learned from past experience not to submit final returns until late March, since the bug fixes and form corrections are often not final until then. This is true for either TurboTax or TaxCut.)
However, here's my current take: this is a fine program, and certainly more than adequate for the necessary help preparing a tax return. I've used TaxCut in the past, but have used TurboTax for the past few years. I decided to use TaxCut this year because of the price difference, and because the new licensing policy for TT is annoying. So far I'm finding it easy to use, and trouble-free in importing data from the previous year TurboTax file and current year TXF files.
One minor weakness compared to TurboTax: I remember that in the 07 TT you could remove a specific set of imported data; I haven't found anything like that in this program. Not a biggie for me, since I always save "checkpoints" in separate files so I can revert to a previous version if I need to, but it's the kind of little thing that makes TT a bit better in my opinion. Just not sufficiently better that I will pay anything Intuit wants to charge (just a matter of principle for me).
Some general comments, based on experience over many years of doing my own (often very complicated) returns: Neither program is perfect by any means. For many complicated situations you have to do your own calculations externally (I use Excel), or enter data manually. Be aware that dealing with AMT, AMT credits, and stuff like that remains mind-bendingly difficult, just not as nightmarish as doing them without a program to help. And you should always sanity check your results, because odd calculation bugs can persist for a long time. (I found a very stupid, but hard to find, calculation bug in TurboTax a few years ago, having to do with AMT.)
I will post an update in a few weeks when I've had the chance to make more progress with my return. Will be able to review the state program as well at that point, perhaps.
51 of 53 found the following review helpful:
Taxcut works great for former TurboTax usersDec 31, 2008
By Galen M. Gruman
"gmgruman"
I switched to Taxcut this year after the deceitful pricing for Intuit's TurboTax. I had used TurboTax since 1997, so I was a bit nervous about making the switch, especially after having tried Taxcut in 2004 and finding its import of TurboTax files to be poor. But Intuit's scammy behavior was too offensive for me to remain a customer.
The good news is that Taxcut works just fine, importing my TurboTax files and providing a clean, easy interview interface (TurboTax's has gotten too complex, so I switched to using the forms mode instead a couple years back). The forms are fine, too, though I do wish you could have the forms and interview running in parallel in Taxcut as you can in TurboTax -- that's helpful during final review. (Taxcut can display both, but you have to switch to forms-only mode to add or change entries in the form.) I also wish I could increase the forms' type size, but TurboTax can't do that either.
Anyhow, the bottom line is that Taxcut does the job well, so if you're a long-time TurboTax user like me, don't bne afraid to switch.
85 of 92 found the following review helpful:
Switched from Turbotax, seems comparable.Dec 08, 2008
By KiddosMom
I also switched to Taxcut this year after many years of preparing my return with Turbotax. To me, it's essentially the same. Taxcut imported last year's turbotax data which helps by pre-filling in a lot of forms. You go through a very similar interview process. You can go to the actual forms and tweak the numbers.
Some things which are different:
1. taxcut auto saves every few minutes.. so if you are experimenting, you ought to make a copy first and mess with that, otherwise you might find the changes have been written to disk without explicitly saving them.
2. Schedule C does not allow joint spouse ownership as is available in turbotax. Turbotax would autmatically split all the income, expenses, taxes for SE, etc into two sets for you. Tax cut says you have to do this by yourself manually. (which defeats the purpose of using software)
3. If you go to the actual form for Schedule C and double click in the box to toggle Y/N for passive activity, the program consistently crashes.. thank goodness for that frequent auto-save. I don't know where to report this to H&R block since their customer service doesn't have an email address. You can change the value of this box through the interview, however.
4. You can only add up to 6 items per field (via the itemized list) where as in turbotax I never encountered a limit.
In conclusion, despite some minor problems which I hope will be fixed in an update, Taxcut seems to be an adequate replacement for turbotax if you want to make a statement to protest Intuit and yet still get your taxes done.
110 of 121 found the following review helpful:
 Switched from TurboTax and sorry I didJan 16, 2009
By M in SC
I bought TaxCut because at the time TurboTax had a stupid policy of charging an extra $10 for each printed tax return. They later reversed this, but I had already started preparing a year-end planning pro forma return using TaxCut. Now that I've used the product, it would have been better to stick with TurboTax even if I had to pay extra to print a planning return. (And of course, now TurboTax has dropped that stupid charge, so it's no longer a problem.)
TaxCut advantages: (1) it's a little cheaper, and (2) it has some limited audit protection service built in. While I don't think it's as good as the extra-cost ($35) audit offering available for TurboTax, but for a relatively simple return it may save you from buying that kind of insurance. That's it. In every other way TurboTax is better.
Here are just some of the TaxCut deficiencies: (1) Interview is MUCH less thorough. I found numerous areas where TurboTax takes you through detail with explanations while TaxCut just has you fill in a number without a lot of explanation. (2) One-click relevent help for each entry -- TaxCut often sends you to a generic help page that's not relevent, while TurboTax usually gives you immediate specific details about that particular line. The TaxCut online help is poor. (3) One-click access to itemized lists. Both products let you enter a mini-spreadsheet to sum totals for any entry. But when you go to re-open a list, TurboTax takes you right to the list, while TaxCut just gives you a menu of all the lists in your return, with no hint of which is which other than Form and Line Number. If you have a form open you can know the form and line number, but if you're in the middle of an interview screen you need to have it all memorized, or else open the lists by trial and error. (4) Import from Quicken had a number of errors which needed manual correction.
I could go on with user interface and feature deficiences, but I'll close with problems when installing updates. I went through a lot of trouble when the product said it needed to update itself, which it proceeded to do, except the update didn't actually happen so it kept saying it still needed an update. TaxCut support responded promptly via online chat, but gave me bad advice involving dubious system startup changes. I actually found the solution in another one of these Amazon reviews when I did Google searches to find people who might have answers. This burned off a number of hours I could have spent doing something else!
I do think TaxCut is adequate for relatively simple returns but I'm giving it a low 2-star rating because the alternative is quite a bit better and the prices aren't much different.
PS when comparing prices, don't forget that the cost to do STATE efile is big. (TurboTax also dings you for state efile.) Remember that to gain the benefit of TaxCut's bundled audit assistance for your state return, you must efile.
PPS I also reviewed TurboTax 2008 when users were rebelling against the stupid pay-for-print policy. At the time I gave them one star, but now that the policy has changed I would raise my rating, except Amazon has no way to change a rating once published. If you happen to see both reviews, TurboTax is the better product.
See all 322 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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