Taxing times

[mdlbear]

Well, I've just spent most of the last 5 hours or so feeding data to TaxCut. Is it my imagination or has the UI gotten worse over the last couple of years? The sequencing between entries in the form that lets you fill in new values for the entries you made the previous year is totally broken. And it keeps trying to put your data in "my documents" instead of in the install directory, as it used to, so you have to keep drilling down to it. Stupid.

Just a couple of things that I have to chase down now; unfortunately one of them will be hard: it involves determining the basis for a stock sale, which in turn requires tracing back through at least five years worth of records. Grr.

The rest of the family is off at a local SCA event, so they don't have to hear my screams.

Comments

[patoadam]

I have used TurboTax for many years and I am quite happy with its ease of use, flexibility, functionality, and accuracy. My only complaint is that the thieving scoundrels at Intuit forced me to upgrade to Quicken 2004 from from Quicken 2001, which I was using quite happily, in order to download my Quicken data into TurboTax.

[mdlbear]

TaxCut usually gets better reviews, and last year TurboTax pulled that copy protection stunt. Never liked Intuit anyway; I don't trust them.

Some of the UI problems (like where it wants to put your data) are probably unfixable if they want to stay compatible with Windows; since I don't like "click-to-type" UI's in general I'm pretty much out of luck until Linux takes over.

[patoadam]

Having used Quicken 2004 for a little while, I can see that it is a considerable improvement, but I still resent being coerced. And I agree, the copy protection in TurboTax last year was annoying.