Hands-On Report--TaxCut 2003 Premium for Mac

We finally finished our 2003 tax returns, well, mostly. We're still waiting for the Commonwealth of Virginia to bless our Monday afternoon electronic filing. The feds took less than 24 hours to do so but, not to worry, the VA return is not due until May 1st. We also filed a California return which had to be printed and mailed since we are a non-resident. We are not sure why the state that houses the electronic industry capital of the world either can't or won't process an e-filed non-resident return. Doing so might even save the budget-troubled state a few bucks.

We are extremely impressed with the 2003 tax year version of TaxCut from H&R Block. It ran perfectly on Mac OS X 10.3.3. We know this endorsement probably doesn't help you decide on which tax preparation software to use for your 2003 return. Since we always owe Uncle Sam more money and the preparation of data for entry from our records is such a huge chore that takes a lot to get up for, we usually prepare our returns in the last fews days before April 15th. Our New England Editor swears by TurboTax from Intuit. Our Editor in Chief switched to TaxCut several years ago because it was much cheaper then and had received better reviews than MacInTax (now TurboTax). But doing taxes is such a chore that neither of us can quite bring ourselves to do it twice or more using the range of tax preparation software available for the Mac.

Our tax return is fairly complicated with several businesses plus a primary employer and income sourced from two states. Fortunately, Virginia and California have an agreement to avoid double state taxation but, unfortunately, not one to reduce the hassle of filing two returns. After checking for, downloading and installing a set of updates, TaxCut 2003 quickly imported the data from our 2002 return with no problem. Up popped a report for all of the forms we used in 2002 showing completed data entry fields for 2002 and blank ones for 2003. It appeared to be a relatively simple matter of just entering the gathered 2003 data on that one report form. Since we had a couple of new/different 1098 & 1099 forms, we decided instead to go through the interview and watch the report change as we did so.

This year, TaxCut's interview was well-tailored to continuing from a prior year, much better than the TaxCut versions of prior years and we whizzed through it. The total data entry time for all three returns was less than half that of previous years. Our federal return was straight forward with no glitches, missing IRS forms nor the few crashes that we encountered previously.

The interviews for the state returns were much more helpful than in previous years. TaxCut's Help system for the state returns was more user-friendly, not just a partial or often incomplete recitation from the state form instructions. Only one computation on paper forms was needed to make a data entry and that one was silly. We had to manually compute whether or not we owed a penalty on our Virginia return for under payment when the rule was essentially whether or not our underpayment was less than 10 per cent of what we owed. You'd think H&R Block could have programmed that one.

After completing the data entry, TaxCut checked for errors and questionable entries. It found no errors and issued a half dozen "warnings," questions to check up on in our three returns. Fortunately, the warnings checked out as okay. We e-filed our federal and Virginia returns and printed and mailed our California return. All with no glitches.

In summary, TaxCut Premium for Mac for the 2003 tax year is excellent. Since it continues to be improved significantly each year, we highly recommend it and intend to use it again next year.