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It’s that time of year again and many of us will be using some sort of tax software to do our taxes. But is that a smart idea? I recently bought a copy of H&R Block’s Taxcut and it has been pretty good. I have also tried TurboTax. Both of these programs have their strong suits but there are also many little annoyances.

While I was using the TaxCut software, the software was quite easy to use, but it was not very user friendly. You can see the items being entered onto the form, but if you need to override something that the software does not calculate itself, you cannot E-File. Isn’t that the whole point of doing this with software? So I began to enter in the Self Employment numbers and it tells me that I owe over $10,000, because I was enver prompted to enter in the Estimated Taxes that I paid over the course of the year! I say boo to that. So I tried to override and it warned me about not being to E-File! So I gave up. It didn’t even tell me where to put my deduction for using tax preparation services from 2005.

TurboTax has its issues too. It was easier to use overall and it prompted me to put in the payments that I had for my Estimated Taxes. They both came out with the right refund amount, but TurboTax did it in a more efficient way, so I could see where it was doing the calculation. Taxcut did not. In the end, Taxcut does what it needs to do, but I do not recommend buying it for your taxes, because its going to make you end up doing your taxes at your local H&R Block anyway. So, to you, my accountant friends….any takers on my federal taxes, there’s a free lunch in it for ya.