Finally got around to trying to get output from It's Deductable 7, configured for tax year 2004. This program is so bad that it is hard to believe that it is from Intuit (actually, I doubt that it was developed by them - my quess is that it was "acquired").
Complaints:
- (I don't remember this clearly, so I could have it slightly wrong.) Apparently, the "market values" database from Intuit and your database of entries are kept in the same file. Anyway, upon updating from v7.0.7 to 7.2.0, the program declared that it couldn't update the market values database without clobbering my data. I had to back up my data, apply the update, and restore the data (but, had I not been cautious, I could have lost my data entirely. (Imagine a corresponding problem in TTAX - "now, we are going to update the program, but in so doing, we are going to wipe out the tax data you've entered so far.)
- ITSD7 prints out it's own 8283 for those who are not using TTAX. That form was riddled with errors. In particular, it insists on filling in the acquired cost/date/how fields when it doesn't have to (under 0 is the threshold, I think), and seems to make up it's own numbers to put in the cost field. Typically, they were about 4x times the donation value, but sometime it filled in zero. The (unnecessary) "date aquired" seems also to be made up, and was (erroreously) set to the donation date for entries where there was a single donated item. For the one entry (on my return) where the date WAS required (a car donation), ITSD7 chose 1/1/1900 as the aquired date (sorry, ITSD7, but the car wasn't built until 1985).
- I couldn't find a way to edit an existing entry, to try to fix the 1/1/1900 date, so I called technical support. The kindly gentleman who talked to me seemed as if he had never seen the program, and suggested that maybe it was Acrobat (!!!!!!!!!) that was "making up" the 1/1/1900 date. When I convinced him that was unlikely (if Acrobat was the problem, then what was there most certainly wouldn't have even looked like a date), he couldn't figure out how to edit the entry either. After about 5 minutes, he finally figure out how to do it, but the acquired date could not be entered directly - it could only be changed by scrolling though a calendar, which scrolled though months at the rate of about 1 month per second (no year-at-a-time scrolling is provided) After holding down the month-advance button for about 10 minutes, I finally got the date to a reasonable value in 1995.
- The program has virtually no help, and in many cases hides things where it takes quite a while to find them, so it needs more help information rather desperately.. The excercise above in (3) is a case in point.
- I'm actually am using TTAX, so at some point I exported the data to TTAX. That exporting of data had errors, and hence had to be checked. All of this is made more difficult by the fact that neither TTAX nor ITSD sorted their output by date, and TTAX combined into one entry some things that had required 2 entries in the ITSD 8283 output. Among other things, the import process inexplicably changed the acquisition cost on the donated car from 00 to 15. The good news about the import is that TTAX doesn't fill in the acquired date/cost/how fields when they are not required, so the fact that ITSD had many of these messed up became largely irrelevant.
- The product is written in Visual Basic, and installing it junks up one's machine (without warning) with bunch of VB stuff which is, of course, not removed on uninstall.
ITSD7 is well more than a year old now, and has received several updates. I'm amazed that, at this late date, it is still as broken as it is. For a product with the market size that these products have, it is hard to imagine a product this broken or a tech support staff that is so uninformed more than a year after the products hit the streets.
But, my fundamental question would be - are the new versions of ITSD still this bad, or have they gotten their act togetter any more at this point? Is the new product still based on VB, or did they rewrite it from scratch (as seems to be warranted here)?
Wally B