Wednesday, April 15, 2009

TaxAct Software Review: Taxes ... finally ... done .... crash ... recovered!

http://strangeherring.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/uncle-sam-taxes.jpgHappy April 15th.

What a week. In the last few minutes I have available to do it, I finally finished my taxes. I've never been this close to the wire before. I'm usually done in February.

TurboTax and HR Block TaxCut are getting too expensive.

This year I used TaxAct.

Review: It was not as simple as TurboTax, but not bad at all for $17 (federal, schedule C, and state)!

TaxAct crashed as I was saving my final return and I reverted somehow to an earlier version which was lacking my final two hours of corrections.

Luckily, TaxAct has an auto back-up feature and I was able to find a recent copy and get everything back ... as far as I can tell.

Also, if you want to file electronically, you'll need to know your gross income for 2007 when filing your 2008 return. Because I read about fraud every day and the fact that most security breaches happen with forms submitted to servers electronically, I choose to file by mail.  TaxAct prints nice forms, but does not provide the informational cover sheet that TurboTax does showing the correct mailing addresses.

Here they are: Federal Return addresses, State of California return.

I filed my paper tax return today and spent a little extra to get the U.S. Postal Service Certified Mail Receipt.

Next year should be a breeze to prepare if I import this year's information into TaxAct 2009. ... they may even have the bug that caused the crash under Windows XP fixed by then.

No comments: