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Re: What I do not like about tax preparation software

My experience has been mostly with TurboTax.

> > My biggest gripe boils down to the software making me do things that I > bought the computer to do for me. The software should minimize the > mental effort I expend searching. The computer does not know what I want > so I realize I must explicitly tell the computer what to search for. > Nevertheless, I should be able to search for a term occurring anywhere > in an open window whether or not it is in data or in the text of the > forms.

A human tax preparer might be the best choice.

Reply to
removeps-groups
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You should also consider providing input directly to Intuit. It probably does little good (other than your feeling better after venting) to post your observations here. Intuit has an "Inner Circle" program designed to solicit just these sorts of opinions. Contact them directly to learn about it.

Reply to
Russ in San Diego

They also have their own forums, where you can solicit advice from other users.

But I get the impression that Salmon isn't really interested in discussing TurboTax, he just wants to vent.

Reply to
Barry Margolin

Why do you keep on repeating this lie, even though I've told you several times that you can use the Open Form button to search for a form by keyword? It's available in forms mode, not interview mode.

I do have some minor complaints about this program not doing what I expect computers to do for me. Most mutual funds report the percentage of their dividends that are from government obligations. But TT doesn't provide any place to enter the percentage, I have to use a calculator to perform this multiplication. Any time I have to go outside the program to perform a common calculation, it means that the TT folks left out a useful worksheet.

Reply to
Barry Margolin

Who created the list of keywords? Is it the list of words that someone at Intuit thinks are relevant, or does it include every (non-trivial) word that appears in the form plus synonyms?

Seth

Reply to
Seth

They're just the names of the forms and worksheets, mostly taken from the official IRS forms. E.g. if you type "wage", it matches:

Form W-2: Wage & Tax Statement Wages, Salaries, & Tips Worksheet Form 8919-T: Uncollected SS and Medicare Tax on Wages Form 8919-S: Uncollected SS and Medicare Tax on Wages

So it's not a full-text search engine, just an easy way to filter down the list of forms to select from.

If you're looking for the 1099 from The Dog Company, Inc., you would first search for 1099, select the appropriate type (1099-INT, 1099-DIV, etc.), and then you'll get a list of all those 1099's and you can select the one you want to fix.

Reply to
Barry Margolin

That's not a very useful search, then. If I know approximately what a line item is called, but not what the form it's on is called, it doesn't help me at all.

(In particular, that search doesn't return the 1040 itself, which is where the line item for Wages goes.)

Seth

Reply to
Seth

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