Taxes in general suck. I don’t mind paying them, but I DO mind filing them.  There has been software out for years to help make filing Taxes much easier. But for just as long the Macintosh market has been pretty much ignored Tax wise. Sure there was software, it just didn’t work. And worst of all, there were reports that the same return got different results when done on the two platforms. So for the last four years, I’ve had to use the Windows version.

This year I decided to take the plunge and purchased Turbo Tax 2007 for OSX. After reading the differences between the four versions, I decided to go with the Deluxe version.

I’ll be the first to admit that my taxes are a bit complicated. In addition to a home office and associated expenses and depreciation (but no real profit) from an outside company, and un-reimbursed work related expenses, there is some dividend from stocks and bonds.

Turbo Tax is fairly easy to understand. Enter in the info from your W-2 and 1099 forms if any. It even dutifully picked up last years information from the Windows 2006 version. Then it was on to answering a ton of questions about other expenses and income. The software does a fairly good job of splitting the taxes into ten distinct sections to help keep the taxes a little simpler.

Despite that, I still had problems.

So when assigning expenses to the outside business, mileage on my personal vehicle was a pain. The software wanted me to assign the car itself as a business expense, including such things as gas, repairs, oil changes etc. I had all the information and dutifully assigned it, but it’s still unclear as to how much of that total it assigned as a taxable deduction. Since the actual mileage for this business was just under 1000 of the 12,000 miles put on it, I would assume that it’s only taking 1/12th of that, but the number it gave me as a deduction came out closer to half the actual repairs.

Then the two computers that are 90% used for this business caused problems later on – no matter what date I entered the software kept complaining that the purchase date had to be before the in service date. I assume the problem came up because I didn’t ever set, nor could find a place to change the in service date. After five attempts to “fix” the problems I finally just had to continue past them. The total deduction comes to $75, so it’s not that big of a deal

In the next step for un-reimbursed work related expenses it was not apparent where mileage for the car was to be included. It was buried under several steps and I had to go back through that entire section three times to find it. I swear it just wasn’t there the first two times.

After nearly five hours of “correcting” my data and double checking that I had everything covered, it was time to print out and file. The print out that I did get was not the easy “Send this to the State, Send this to the Feds,” that I was expecting. Nor was there any “copy” of the W-2 that the 2006 version Auto-Generated. Perhaps this was due to the complication of my taxes, though I seriously doubt it.

Getting tired of dealing with taxes, I came back to it the next morning. Instead of being able to just print the taxes out (despite having saved the night before JUST before printing,) I had to go through the entire last section again. Not only that but the return amount was actually $100 LESS then it was the night before! Running through the final time the In Service date issue for the two business related PC’s popped up again in a big way. I was not able to find a way to fix it, and continuing past just failed. I actually ended up going back and totally removing those expenses.

After doing all this Turbo Tax gave a meter representing the chance of an audit. The first time it was on the low side, at 1/3 or just under. Now it’s smack in the middle – at Likely. It gave me reasons why, but no way to fix, or an explanation of why it was different from the night before. After three more times through the ENTIRE return and with no tweaking, not only was my chance of audit the same, but now I was to receive even more money back. Again for no reason, I like getting more money but fail to see how just going through the system without any changes would change the refund amount.

I decided to attempt to E-file, Intuit charges $17.95 per a tax return, which actually means per federal and then again per the state. This wasn’t apparent until right before it wanted to charge the credit card, or take it directly out of the refund for a modest $30 fee.

Out of curiosity I took the tax file to a Windows 2007 version. It imported fine but the refund amount was much closer to the original, and the chance of audit was back to the same place.

Overall I like the look and feel of Turbo Tax. But it still feels like the Mac version has issues and is inconsistent. After the amount of time I spent going back through the software again and again, plus the filing fee on top of the cost of the software itself, I would have been much better using a real accounting/Tax professional. I at least would have been more confident in the results.

“Luckily”, due to my “chance” of getting audited, Intuit provides another piece of software to help me get ready for that. Let’s cross the fingers and see what happens.

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