TurboTax, Rental Properties, and Depreciations

"David Morrison" wrote

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I agree with JM. A few more comments:

T-Tax has handled E's at least as far back as TY 1991. I've tried other tax prep programs but my preference is T-Tax, for the reasons that concern you: Schedule E and depreciation. T-Tax has never erred on depreciation that I know of. In my opinion, T-Tax is quite accurate in its calculations as well as selecting the correct forms; it's also relatively easy and straightforward.

Disadvantages of T-Tax for rentals:

1. A few years ago, T-Tax limited the number of E's to 10. This meant it could no longer easily handle more than 30 non-contiguous properties. TaxCut and TaxAct do not have this limitation. IRS emailed me that it is permissible to use one entry on E that totals references to a spreadsheet that contains several non-contiguous properties; but that's a pretty clumsy work-around for this limitation -- especially when you think about carryovers. Also, T-Tax -- like Q -- does not support OLE or macros.
2. Vehicle information must be entered for every property that incurs vehicle expenses. So, for EVERY property one must redundantly enter the base info for the vehicle(s) such as vehicle specifics and total mileage for the year. Although the vehicle specifics carries from year to year once it's entered, I find it clumsy that the program doesn't offer a better way of handling vehicles. (One should be able to simply select a vehicle and enter the unique data for any particular property). Intuit's ProSeries tax prep software (which I have used since T-Tax limited the number of E's) also has this same peculiarity. Note: I haven't looked at either program yet for TY 2005, so this may have been fixed now.

I tried TaxCut a few years ago. I was horrified at how poorly TaxCut handled depreciation and many other business-related items. Some time back I posted a text file here with notes on my last experience with TaxCut. TaxCut is surprisingly immature for a product that's promoted by H&R Block. Stick with T-Tax if you have 30 non-contiguous properties or less.

Second Ricks comments on TaxCut and depreciation. I tried TC the year TTax tried the C-dilla protection scheme. This meant importing the prior years TTax data file into TC. The depreciation info was seriously scrambled. Made some attempt to straighten it out in TC but was not entirely successful. Went back to TTax [C-dilla and all] that year and am sticking with it.

"JM" wrote in news:1140286416.167620.158760 @g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:

I tried taxcut a couple years, when they offered an all-state deluxe version. I didn't really like the sked E handling, but it may have just been a matter of familiarity (used TTax since 87). At that time, only a handful of state returns used taxcut format, the rest were actually spreadsheets that took some input from the taxcut federal.

I've found ttax handling of state vs fed depreciation helpful. Even wothout using a specific sate product, the federal product provides the depreciation differences that resulted from the recent (2003?) accelerated federal depreciation for 5 yr asssts.

scott s. .