Taxing Taxes

As we head into April, it's time to complete that annual, royal PITA that is better known as taxes. Of course to cut the complex task down to size, I enlist the aid of some digital help, better known as tax software. My weapon of choice is TaxCut, the perennial underdog to the better down TurboTax.

After using it, I'm starting to wonder about the wisdom of that choice. For example, the error checker was questioning values that were a resounding zero anyway so I'm not sure it's worth that much effort to fix a number that won't effect the tax anyway.

This year, there was a new feature. There is a way to be able to print directly to a PDF. This is a nice feature as I usually discover some error after the mountain of paperwork pops out of the printer. I'd like to say it worked well, but it didn't. After printing to a PDF, the TaxCut program froze. Seriously, and this error was consistently reproducible. This is rather annoying, especially given that for the number of years this has been around, I'd expect it to be more stable, especially given that I've got freeware solutions that can accomplish the same thing without crashing.

After struggling with it over the weekend, let's just say that next year I'll be taking a closer look at which tax software I'm going to be using. Taxes are difficult enough without crashing software.

Jonas