This year it has problems
Reviewed in the United States on April 8, 2024 | Rating: 3/5 | Best Sellers in Software
ive been turbotax use for 5 years prior to that i had been doing my taxes by hand took me 5 hrs every year and with tt it improved to about 3 hrs and not having to use the calculator not badthis year however the software has deterioratedi have always had a bit of a complaint with the tt reading w2 and then starting asking questions about the codes and such its a high time intuit rectified that and learned all the quirksand slight variations  standard w2s around the nation have but ok that one we knowthis time it started with me trying to see if i could have any deduction from the fact my son is a fulltime student and ive been paying the tuition it explicitly said we will look at your 1098t formwhile trying to work with it it kept messaging you have no more eligible students i tried to add one no luck i kept going back and forth several times to no availthen i called the tech support people in tech are excellent have to give it to them especially the woman i connected to the 1st time brenda very helpful but she was as puzzled as i was we went back and forth then eventually went to check the initial entry data personal data kids etc found nothing special got back started going back and forth until at one last iteration a dropdown list appeared with the family names and suggested picking the student from it it had not appeared beforeafter that it it accepted my sons name as the student but then it refused to accept the number displaying 0 again we went back and forth and eventually it occurred to brenda to look at the usage notes which she had and i did not and it said our combined income was over the limit where i could have that tuition deductionboth she and i agreed that there should be an explanation message you cannot have this because your combined income is over xxxxx it does this with other deduction so why not with this onei lost about 45 minutes with thisthen there was the time to put medical expenses i knew this did not work for me before due to the combined income value so i skipped this section in the federal return but then our state said it would allow some and asked me if i wanted to report it i answered yes after which it showed me empty space with no box to enter anything no explanation eitheri called support the 2nd timeafter about 10 minutes we established that the amount is transferred from the fed return i went back put everything in and it did appear in state return after thatthis is bad interfacing also if asking a user to put a number explicitly explaining that our state allows lesser percentage for the medical expenses 25 vs 7 for the fed it should then either let me input the number or explicitly say that the number is missing in your federal return please go back and put it in thereso i was done with all my returns and was about to efile the deluxe version allows free fed and charges 25 for state efiling this was fineit took my personal data drivers license etc then asked me to put my bank account info in and took me right to the submit place forgot the button name the one you press to efile it explained that this is it once i press it there is no returni pressed it then nothing for a few minutes i waited then i realized nothing had happened i went to the bank it was not chargedi pressed the button again this time after a while it signaled an error saying could not convert report for submission i did this several times went back and forth through the info same thing kept happeningi called the support the 3rd timea very nice lady went back and forth with meeventually she asked to check if the windows i had was up to datewe went to check and it was up to date according to the messagethen she asked to search for updates one from april was available so i installed itthen after having rebooted the computer i went to tt againthen we restarted efilingthis time it took me to the message how do you want to paythere was a suggested 46 charge from fed return this was written so cryptic so the support person herself was not sure if it wanted to charge me for efiling fed return in addition to the 25 for state returneventually after careful reading the message why ask me for the 46 from fed return when it clearly showed i owed some money to the fed i decided to proceed with a credit card payment and it only suggested 25 charge for the state one as i was expecting so i put in my cc info and this time it did efile both returns fed an statewhewalso have to mention it loaded the state portion of the software separately after i was done with the fed part which is another irking thing it was all at the same time beforei spent over 6hrs this time more than i used to spend doing it manuallyi am not sure why this happened this year and whether there were issues with the software test crew or qc or else but i would strongly suggest to intuit to shake up their qc crew or else some folks might be inclined to try other vendors or like myself who had spent 28 years doing the returns manually simply revert to doing it that way