Problems with Mac Desktop Premier - A Summary

[jschaffe]

I've filed my taxes, but, here's the review I submitted at the end of the process:

TT Review (3 Stars)

The tax preparation functionality seems as tight and accurate as it ever was, and the Premier product covers all my needs. This would earn it 5 stars except for an increasing number of other problems, some unaddressed for several years.

By far the major problem is the activation process. Two years ago I ran out of activations, even though I never installed TT on more than one computer. Last year I barely made it to the end. This year, I couldn't even install it and migrate my data from last year's return without burning up one extra activation. The insane plea at the beginning for me to use online TT (after spending money to purchase it) cost me one activation when I clicked Cancel. Awful! After that, I never quit TT, I ejected all external drives, disconnected Ethernet and all USB devices, and avoided updating any other software. This is not by any stretch of the imagination user friendly! The idea of sharing it with my children is a fantasy. Congratulations, they have to buy their own copy. Guess Intuit is making money, but I call this false advertising. I've been a TT user since it was first released as MacinTax, but if this activation debacle continues I'll seriously be looking at other tax prep software.

I was forced to keep my TT files in Documents which as a Macintosh user I avoid for everything else because so much disorganized junk gets stored there. At first I couldn't even open last year's return to do the migration until I moved it into Documents. Thank God I read the community posts about activation and noticed one PC user talking about the location of TT files.

The UI is burdened by intrusive and repetitive marketing for Intuit services I do not need or want. It's fine to offer them up front and near the end, but please, save me dozens of unneeded clicks by keeping intrusions to a minimum.

There are many other wasted click examples. Every year I've been advised that I could reduce taxes by putting money away for retirement (I'm already retired). Click. No, I actually don't qualify. Click again. The revised UI to enter Interest, Dividends, and Gain seems like the developers didn't finish changing from the old UI to a new one, which is a lot harder to understand than the old one. More wasted clicks. I was asked if I still have the same banking and investment accounts as last year. When I imported my information from the institutions, TT created new entries for each fund or institution. Many more clicks to investigate and delete the unused original duplicated entries.

I could go on, but this is a summary of my experience.

[whodiini]

You're lucky if that is the only bothersome issues.  My biggest by far complaint is their refusal to tell you what the critical updates affect.  It simply says critical updates and as the user, you are left guessing what changed and whether it will affect you or not. Here is my real life example of not knowing what a critical update impacted.  Normally I import the prior year's file and start from there.  I learned the hard way that one needs to launch last year's TT first, get the critical updates BEFORE importing the file. One year, the issue was the critical update corrected an issue where TT did not carry the depreciation on rental property properly to the next year.  Tax due/refund didnt change, but when importing the file to the next year, important info was missing. It took me 2 years later to realize the problem, so I had to amend 3 years of tax returns to fix it. What a mess for their arrogance!