Reviews of TurboTax Premier 2007, 2008, 2009

By Alan Silverstein, email address: ajs@frii.com
Last update: April 1, 2010

Note: This is installing and running TTP on an updated Windows/XP PC.

Contents:

• 2009 Negatives

• 2008 Overall
• 2008 Positives
• 2008 Negatives

• 2007 Overall
• 2007 Background
• 2007 Positives
• 2007 Negatives
• 2007 Postscript (happy news)

2009 Negatives

Overall the product is noticeably better than last year, especially forms access, so don't let the following feedback bum anyone out. But here goes anyway.

• SLOW INSTALLATION: Getting TTP (from CD) is so slow (many minutes) that it would be nice if hovering over the rectangle in the toolbar would show the percentage completed, without having to raise the window.

• STATUS REPORTING: Would be nice to have 100% on-screen reporting at ALL TIMES of both status (sometimes while waking up nothing appears at all) and progress (how much longer will something take?)

• CUT/PASTE: Could the paste control number (from PDF copy of W2) into W2 download form, but not dollar amount; ignored right-click.

  In general, continued lack of consistent ability to cut/paste TTP window text boxes remains annoying; causes a fair amount of tedious retyping.

• MISLEADING SUMMARY: We had agricultural payments for 2009. The "Government Payments Summary" screen still shows all zeroes after using Edit to enter my 1099-G data. I'm sure it's in there somewhere, but shouldn't the screen reflect what I just did?

• FARM INCOME, BIGGIE AGAIN: Quick interview asks if we had any income from a farm. ONCE AGAIN THIS YEAR, THIS IS MISLEADING. We rent out pastures and share-crop some crops with tenants, but we really don't know how to answer this question (except for painful experience in past years). I said "Yes" and went down a ways before thinking I had it wrong, backed up, said "No", then the NEXT screen asked me about farm RENTAL income.

  Sigh. Intuit must realize that people with farm rental income do not understand the first question you are asking! YES we had income from a farm, but it goes on Form 4835 NOT on Schedule F, and your question would trap and mislead the innocent.

• DONATIONS: Disappointed that the donations section still assumes I want to enter ALL of my details, charity by charity, into TTP. That would be fine (although tedious) if I did want to do it that way, but we have our own separate records of donations made over the years. I do NOT fire up TTP over the year, I don't even buy the 2009 version until 2010 rolls around. I want to just enter total cash + non-cash donation amounts for each of me and my wife. I'm forced to make up information here, like a fake date. Give me a clean way to just say, "the details are my own business, I have my own records, here are my totals."

• STATE VEHICLE TAXES: Colorado added vehicle registration ROAD FEE and BRIDGE FEE items last year (as titled on registration forms). I suspect they are not deductible like the "OWN TAX" amount, but it would be reassuring if TTP said as much. I was not able to find anything on the web detailing this either. Apparently the gov't ripped us off by calling them "fees" not "taxes"; the latter would require a public vote under the Colorado constitution. And thus they screwed us again because this way the "fees" are not deductible? Apparently not.

• REVIEW MISLEADING: Under "Federal Review", "Taxes", the Review button leads surprisingly to "Deductions and Credits", where I wanted to see how they computed the tax. I had to look up the form instead.

• FORMS: My impression is that Forms access is simpler and more logical... I can get to a list of all of them, from anywhere? But I still can't tell which forms go to the IRS and which don't. Some titles are bold, some are not, but some worksheets are bold, and I don't know the difference. There are extra copies (?) of some items for no obvious reason. It's STILL hard for me to review my forms and know exactly what I am submitting, at least before I get to the print-to-PDF/save stage much later.

• IRA CONTRIBS: If there's a way for TTP to help me figure my IRA contribution limits for 2009, I still don't see it. Appears it wants me to tell it what I actually did, not tell me what I'm eligible to do. Apparently I must find the worksheet and compute that on my own.

• PERFORMANCE: Going through and reviewing every form brought my PC to its knees. It appears TTP caches forms images already generated, this is good, but it's too dumb to avoid ending up with massive memory use and resulting page faults? "Thrashing is virtual crashing."

• ACROBAT ANNOYANCE: During the Efile process, a popup window about previewing forms using Acrobat says I must have AcroRead installed; "select Continue and we'll install it," but the choices are "Yes" and "No". I said "Yes" and now I'm in a browser window that wants to download the latest Acrobat product. First, "Continue" versus "Yes/No" is a disconnect; and second, it offers me no way to say, "I already have it, just use what I have."

  Same foofahrah later when I try to "Save Forms"; "Preview PDF" insists I must download AcroRead first, but I already have it, and THIS time I cannot proceed without doing SOMETHING. Saying "No" just closes the popup window, and "Yes" brings up the browser again to download. I THINK I have the latest Acroread, and if not, it's annoying that it's only a version issue that needs fixing.

• POPUP PRE-EMPTION: Furthermore, while the "Save" popup window is up, I cannot minimize the TTP window to access my desktop. Very annoying. Hit Cancel, hope that's OK, and it takes a long time.

2008 Overall

I noticed many obvious improvements in the product, including some issues that had bothered me last year. I don't know if my feedback made the difference, but I could see a lot of signs of progress. I'm definitely more "hooked" on TTP now, even learning (and remembering a year later) some user interface aspects that made navigation easier this year.

I still had my share of annoyances though. I had to remind myself several times that the mere fact of having such a powerful tax calculation tool was nearly miraculous, and a CPA would cost at least 10x as much, and still make mistakes, and not answer emails, ...

2008 Positives

• E-filing got a lot cheaper, although I don't recall how much.

• Initial install went pretty smoothly. No issues with having last year's programs or data on the system either. Smooth import/transition.

• The "view forms" section is much better, at least as I perceived it. This year I actually learned ctl-1 and ctl-2 to switch back and forth, found the listed forms to mostly be logically arranged and easy to find, etc. When preparing to eFile, the review and PDF made a lot more sense than last year.

2008 Negatives

• The price at Sam's Club went up from ~$59 last year to ~$75 this year. (We chose to buy the CD again rather than save ~$10 buying an online copy.)

• The second-state cost went up (I think), but we didn't care because both years (2007 + 2008) we used TTP for our "alternate" state, and just transcribed information from it to the excellent NetFile website in our home state.

• After doing initial install/updates and starting TTP again, it said, "checking for updates" again. It would be cool if it knew it had just completed that, and didn't waste my time.

• We went for the faster interview method again this year, not the full interview. I hope we didn't miss any good advice as a result. (Come to think of it, if there's a "what's new for 2008" page like the IRS provides in the paper instructions, I don't recall seeing it.) The package advertised that it could help us find 350 deductions, but as an experienced taxpayer, I didn't want to walk through 350 questions to see if I was missing something new!

• Working alone, I found myself at various times wanting to cut/paste text from TTP windows, say to email an explanation to my wife to ask her how to handle her rental house. I was unable to "cut" from TTP text. Inability to cut/paste in/out of many windows and forms was very annoying (and surprising).

• While the "view forms" section was a lot better, I didn't understand why some items were bold and others normal font. This didn't convey anything useful or obvious to me, just worried me that I was missing something important. Also, there seemed to be some kind of multiple-form open/scroll (horizontally) mechanism above the currently displayed form, but it wasn't very useful as soon as I visited more than 3-4 forms; it was painful to use. I don't mind a push/pop stack, but keeping around all that I'd visited was annoying and didn't make for fast navigation.

• Short interview method: When I opened a category and then did Start/Revisit, did some editing, and said Done, I came back to the top with the category closed down again -- I had to find and reopen it -- that was annoying. My mental model is that I opened and went into X, now back at the top page, I want to view its current status.

• Many pages offer you, "Show Tax Form" when there's no tax form associated. That's annoying. Gray it out or something.

• Donations: The system seemed to want us to enter line-item descriptions of every donation we made. We keep track of this separately "offline", but I couldn't find a way to just tell it "here's the total" without also making up a date, etc.

• Disconnect, minor, noted on rental property screen: "Select your method", presented in the order "expert" or "quick" (reading top-down), but the buttons are in the reverse order (reading left to right), which causes a double-take.

• Entering rental house expenses, I pasted a number from elsewhere, hit TAB, and it got wiped out. Only by moving the mouse and selecting another field would it "stick". Also it unexpectedly rounded off the number (no cents) although W2 form entry did accept cents, which seems inconsistent.

• Running through my personal Schedule E details spreadsheet, I had a number ready for mileage, but was told under the "travel" page not to include vehicles. Later it asked me for "any other expenses," and that was my first opportunity to enter this amount, right or wrong. I did, and it turned out to be wrong. Later on a higher level summary screen, I saw a section below for "vehicle expenses," and had to back it out of the previous location.

• Single biggest issue again this year, despite reporting it last year: Disappointed to find that TTP still thinks passive farm income is subject to SE tax (hundreds or thousands of dollars), and it does not help you avoid it. Apparently the way to avoid SE tax is to enter the same dollar amount as "exempt" on line 5 of 1040-SS (or is it SE this year?)... I couldn't find a way to access it or add it! Buried on forms list under "Sch SE", hard to find... And no way to exempt it?

  Later, I finally discovered that farm and farm rental income (which are not the same thing) can end up on Schedule E, Schedule F, or Form 4835 (which is similar to Schedule F, but does not impose SE tax). Apparently you are supposed to "know" when it asks if you had "farm income", that the answer is "no", you had "farm rental income"! Sheesh. In our case, some of my wife's passive income is from pasture rental, and some is from crop sharing. Even though TTP asked if it was active or passive, it still cluelessly led us into a Schedule F. Later I had to delete this from the forms list (at least the 1040-SE went away too), and find and fill out a Form 4835 "manually".

  I emailed TTP Support about the issue, and got back an inane reply saying apparently they'd fixed my problem... NOT! I had to figure it out (eventually) for myself.

  It took a call to the IRS, and waiting on hold several times, to discover that we should never have been misled by TTP into using 1040 Schedule F! (Which we did end up erroneously using for 2007.) We should have used Form 4835, just as the CPA did in the past before we bought TTP. You would never know this from the interview: "Did you have any farm income?"

  I don't know, if you say "no" to "farm income" and later "yes" to farm rental income, if it knows how to put it on Schedule E versus Form 4835. I guess I'll find out next year.

• Before figuring out the previous issue, I decided to ask Live Community about it. I typed in my question, and then was told I had to register first -- that's obnoxious.

• The help screen said I should be able to use my InnerCircle registration (from last year), but it didn't work, and when I tried to recover my password, it said my user name wasn't known either -- implying it tossed me out after last year -- I did have a written note of both the user name and password.

• I found a way (through View Forms) to add a Form 4835, but trying to fill it out, it wouldn't accept any details, just showed a magnifying glass, which took me to a 1099G, but which had a different total (goes in two different categories). This is no better than for 2007.

• During federal error check, TTP informed me I couldn't have over 2000 miles for vehicle business use (Schedule E), before/after July 1, but with no explanation, nor could I find anything in the forms or instructions saying why not, nor did it ask me earlier to come up with a lower number. This late error without explanation was really irritating.

  Then I figured out that I'd accidentally entered too low a number for total miles, and fixed that. The error check didn't help me understand this, it gave me the impression there was some kind of federal mileage limit.

• TTP cheerfully informed us that we could get a larger refund by doing a (phased-out, not max) traditional IRA contribution, but didn't help us figure out the maximum (qualified) amount. I had to go calculate it for myself, then found the IRA Deduction (not Contribution) worksheet in the forms section to prove it.

2007 Overall

Would I buy it again, or recommend it to others?

Yes, I'll probably buy it again, unless I get recommendations to start fresh with something supposedly better. But I'd only recommend it with caveats.

2007 Background

• I'm a software engineer with human factors training and experience.

• I did my own taxes by hand for many years, using home-brew scripts and spreadsheets specific to my own needs. (Including 1040, schedules A, B, D, sometimes C.)

• Married in 2003, she came with a CPA and new federal schedules (grin). Started using her CPA. He was far from home, didn't communicate well, and made some mistakes, which I caught by comparing with my (expanded) tools.

• After two years, switched to another, local CPA... High costs, with no prior estimates, and still some mistakes, although it was nice that they ran their software to do all the dogwork and produce the forms.

• After two more years, bought TTP in February 2008 for ~$59 at Sam's Club. It was recommended by a friend who'd used it, "for 20 years and it keeps getting better every year."

• I was motivated by some dissatisfactions to create this webpage summarizing my experience. Hopefully this will cause positive changes, or at least inform others of some downsides.

2007 Positives

• Rich set of features, completely handled our return (since we'd been clued which package to buy), and a mostly pretty good GUI. Not too many obvious violations of basic human factors guidelines.

• Simple installation, took a long time, 20-30 minutes total with a high speed connection, but at least it was a clear process.

• Can use item-by-item editing or a step-by-step interview process, and this became clear pretty fast.

• Good use of context-sensitive topic help, and mostly good explanations of logic/reasoning.

• Good automatic raising of a browser for web-sourced material, although it's not always obvious that you were switched to a browser.

• Direct print of full tax package to PDF is great -- once I found it.

2007 Negatives (task-oriented end-user disconnects)

• Overall, more learning curve than I would have liked. Not for just entering the numbers, but for navigating the application and finding what I needed.

• Hidden cost for additional states ($35 each), not mentioned on the box or early in the user interaction; an issue for us because we must file in two states. We decided to use TTP for the "remote" state, and Colorado NetFile (web-based) for our home state. It was, as we'd heard, a very simple answer, although we had to transcribe some numbers from TTP into their website. By doing this, we avoided paying $35 more.

• Cost per return to eFile (~$18) is mentioned on the box, but it was unclear if that's per federal + state return pair, or each separate return. Turns out to be latter (no surprise, oh well), and you don't find out until it's time to pay at the end. You can always print-and-mail instead...

• When navigating back to any section using choices near the top of the screen, you're forced to walk through some screens over and over again ("good news, you are getting a rebate!") even when you don't want interview mode, and are trying to instead select specific items to revisit. Very annoying.

• Cannot easily navigate to viewing any one tax form, although sometimes one pops up below at the bottom of the screen and can be expanded. (Never did notice a pattern to when this did or did not happen.)

• Later I realized that I was completely overlooking the top toolbar, not realizing that it was very application-specific and useful. There are enough other features on the screen to grab your attention while hunting for the answer to a task like, "How do I view my tax forms so far?" You could easily miss the toolbar (I did) and wonder, "What were they thinking, making this so hard?"

• Closing a popup tax form rather than returning to the interview (pressing the wrong button), loses your place. (But not your data. Generally a very good job done of capturing and retaining information.)

• Interview style, and also item lists, do not follow the order of tax forms or lines, which is annoying to those familiar with the forms. There's a hidden transformation from what you enter to the tax forms, and I never did find a way to inquire about these data flows.

• You might say to me, as a tax-savvy end user, why don't you just fill out the forms directly, as you (apparently) can? (Once you figure it out.) But a lot of the perceived value of this application is that it walks you through questions, offers options, answers questions, etc. It know current tax law better than I do, so I do want to walk through its script... But I also want to feel empowered by it, not have details hidden, or lose my place, or have it do things I don't understand and I can't get it to explain.

• TTP asked us for 1099-G info early, created a semi-hidden worksheet, and later I could not find a logical way to bind this worksheet (once I found it) to the farm income page. This was very confusing. It showed a summary dollar total too high, but it was not apparent in the details what was going on. The summary/jump page showed a higher total than the details upon doing edit/review. Later we found the extra, apparently it was hidden as "farm rental income" apart from "farm income," although CPAs never treated it that way.

• Unclear GUI for how to work with a backing document like a 1099-G. What does "1 of 10 copies used" mean? Why did it keep creating untitled or even titled copies? Why was I unable to bind it successfully to what I thought was the appropriate form field? Even after I got the bottom lines to agree with my spreadsheet, on a final review of PDFs, I noticed a total twice what was expected in one cell, although the manually entered "taxable amount" field nearby was correct. I had to go back and figure out how to find and delete a second copy of a 1099-G that had sprung into existence somehow, possibly when I deleted our entire Schedule F and started over.

• Early on, TTP asked us for 1099-MISC info on my wife's rental house. Later it asked for other rental house information. For reasons I don't understand (nor do I recall the details), I found myself re-entering some information identifying the property, although in a different manner. Much later than that, I saw that TTP had created two Schedule E columns (A and B) for the same property, although with slightly different descriptions. One showed the 1099 income, and the other had all the rest of the data.

  Possibly this resulted from the fact that she started with a property management company partway through the year. Hence some of her rental income was via 1099-MISC, and some was not. The interview process apparently had no concept of this, and it routed data as if to two different properties. I elected not to worry about trying to fix this, after previous unhappy experiences dealing with 1099 worksheets. (At this point I still couldn't explain to someone else how those really work, they are mysterious. I see they exist, and I can manipulate them, but any relationship to my tax forms is arcane.) The bottom line is correct, and it should be clear enough that we just "accidentally" separated data all for one property (victims of the tax package).

• Single biggest issue: Despite having the "passive" farm income box checked, TTP insisted that farm income went on 1040-SS line 1. Separate research (including IRS Pub 225 page 74) said this is wrong, also, our CPAs never treated it this way. After going around in loops for a while, I had a new idea... I thought I had to override it to zero on 1040-SS, which caused later problems, see below.

• Each time revisiting one of the screens, TTP auto-pre-checked the box for, "you owe SE tax". if I unchecked that box, next time it would be checked again. Why ask me, if you won't listen to my input?

• Sent feedback about this and one other issue through the feedback mechanism, but never heard anything that way.

• Later I managed to find how to send an email request for technical support. I got a prompt and lengthy reply, but apparently incorrect. They suggested adding Form 4029, which looks like a request to avoid Social Security for moral reasons!

• The screen for entering email text includes a typical very tiny box, which makes it difficult to compose good text.

• The support email response appeared to be replyable, so I wrote back at length to that address, and then got a reply saying my email would be ignored! (With no copy of the original included, either.) That's obnoxious. The from-address or the first few lines of the reply should make it clearer that we are not about to have a conversation, don't even try...

• Over time, I sent two more emails (I think) and got two more replies. None of them actually helped me.

• After generating an email, an "incident ID" is given back to you on-screen, and emailed to you, but the later email reply from tech support doesn't apparently contain it. But if you call the phone number they give you, it asks for that number. It turned out I should have kept the earlier screen or email auto-reply, or figured out that it was the middle part of the number in the human-generated reply's "Subject" text. This was unobvious, and annoying since I was already "held up" trying to resolve a problem.

• I emailed for the third or fourth time. This time when I got a new incident ID number and tried to enter it on the phone system, it was "unknown". Although it didn't seem to make any difference if I had the number, or not! I still could/did wait on hold for a human.

• Wait time estimated at 40 minutes! Eventually I put a cordless phone on speaker mode and waited. When a live person answered, they were patient, but also clueless, and not helpful about my problem.

• Thinking we had a good enough solution using an override, we got through the TTP federal error review/check with no more problems reported, laboriously entered all info needed to eFile, and then were told we could not continue without removing the override! What's the point of the earlier check if it lets me get so close, then disappoints me?

  This particular point was so infuriating, I knew at that moment I was going to create this webpage. My wife and I had to give up for the evening in disgust, wait a few days, and try again.

• Later, I had to figure out on my own that apparently the way to avoid SE tax is to enter the same dollar amount as "exempt" on line 4 of 1040-SS. Recall that the CPAs in the past had never mentioned or used this form at all, and no one I contacted at TTP could explain this, or perhaps even understood the question.

• Once you set up to eFile, including entering info for direct debit of amount due, you can't print the return because the direct debit box is checked! -- Later we discovered that trying to go into "mail my return" to get it printed, was our problem, and there was a way hidden elsewhere to just print it directly to a PDF (which is nice). But as usual, this feature was hard to find, or even to know it existed.

  (Probably their mental model is that you don't want to, or even should not, print your return until it's all done. But I absolutely wanted to see the PDF form, on-screen, at many times, because it was a familiar format, and the one that the IRS would actually use, at least in theory.)

• I'd never used eFile before. TTP offered no way to discover what information would or would not be communicated to the IRS from the 97 total PDF pages in our package. In the past I was reluctant to "snow the IRS" with any form that wasn't required. Did TTP include my 1040-SS with a zero balance, or leave it off? I'm OK with telling the IRS everything they need to know, but dislike sharing with them (or anyone) any personal info they don't need to know... Even if TTP says my audit risk is low.

• After e-filing, the package urged me to print some docs, but I couldn't preview them, and its print initiation page didn't allow me to select that option either at a lower level (on my PC), so I blindly accepted. Fortunately the printout was only four pages long, but none of it is anything I would have chosen to waste ink on, starting with an "advertisement" (thank-you letter) from the company.

• I recall finding lists of tax forms in various ways, but it was generally at least initially confusing what the list meant. One list I vaguely recall was comprehensive, but links took you to blank forms or explanations (?). Another list appeared to be only the forms related to my return, but I couldn't view/print them all at once. Eventually I found the "save to PDF" option (which I think of as a form of printing), and by default it included everything, which was good, although some of the TTP-specific pages are unlabeled in the PDF table of contents, and it's not clear which forms go to the IRS and which are "private worksheets." Also there seemed to be a lot of duplication, with identical information showing up in the same or similar worksheets.

• I didn't mind too much the "advertising" screens asking if I wanted to pay extra for various services. But I was annoyed to discover that live chat help would be pay-as-you-go, and there was no way to just start an email exchange with tech support. I could email them, they would reply, but then I could only write back again, to someone different, through the TTP email screen again, generating a new "incident".

• I was invited by one human tech support email reply to join the TT "inner circle", but didn't know how to find it... Maybe I didn't look hard enough. (Later I found it under "Send Us Feedback", oh well.)

  After e-filing, TTP offered me an online survey, I took it, and then it offered to let me join the inner circle. I decided that, just as I didn't want to pay any extra, I also didn't want to join anything, just to offer the company constructive feedback. Hence, this webpage...

2007 Postscript (happy news)

After I created this webpage, I tried to tell Intuit that it existed. I sent another email through their system. I got back a reply saying: I must have really liked their product, obviously they were successful in meeting my needs, and thanks for the praise! -- I don't know if they were kidding, or maybe it was a canned response sent by a droid in India.

Later I decided to join their Inner Circle just to see what it was about. "That was interesting..." Lots of screens and questions involved; lots of opportunities to type in any text I wanted; also to check-box that I agreed with other people's statements. So far I haven't regretted it; no follow-up "spam" emails or phone calls, etc.

It was never clear if anyone at the company was actually listening. Well a few days later I received a very gratifying "unofficial" email from an engineer at the company (who identified him/herself, but shall remain nameless). We chatted a little in a friendly way, and I was really impressed by what I heard. They do care a great deal about customer satisfaction and new-user experience. They put a lot of effort into getting it right, and making it usable.

It wouldn't surprise me if some of what I experienced resulted from inevitable, perhaps in practice unavoidable, disconnects that happen in any large software package, no matter how hard the authors try to satisfy their users. Tax software must be especially difficult because of the underlying complexity, and the fact that no one really wants to learn it, or to use it (any more than they can help). Couple that with a high-volume, mass market, and it's disappointing but not surprising that the support experience, when you do encounter a glitch or confusion, can seem so erratic.