In January I selected several readers to receive free copies of various income tax software programs. In exchange, they agreed to use the software to do their taxes and write an unbiased review. The summary below was written by FMF reader Lynn and contains her thoughts about CompleteTax’s Premium MVP product. Here are CompleteTax Review #1, CompleteTax Review #2 and CompleteTax Review #3 if you're interested.
Recently FMF selected me as one of several readers to review the CompleteTax Premium MVP Product. For a little background about my tax preparation habits, I am a “semi-retired” lawyer, working approximately twenty hours per week. My husband is fully retired. We always itemize and in addition to my salary, we have dividend and interest income, capital gains (or losses), and a very small amount of farm income from owning some farmland in another state. We don’t operate the farm ourselves. We don’t have any self-employment income so I did not review that aspect of the program.
For many years we have used the Turbo Tax desktop version to prepare our taxes. I have generally been happy with Turbo Tax except that every year I have difficulty in preparing the forms for our farm income. Last year we were in between computers when it was time to file so I did our taxes by hand. I was happy to get a chance to review new tax software to see how it compared to our recent experiences with tax preparation, both using Turbo Tax and by hand.
I had never heard of CompleteTax before receiving it from FMF and initially wondered whether it was a reputable company. I was pleased to learn that CompleteTax was developed by CCH which is a long-time major provider of accounting and tax information to accountants and lawyers. If anyone knows taxes, it should be CCH.
CompleteTax is an online tax preparation program. There is no desktop version. It was easy to start the program, just pick a login name, password and get started. A first time user would be able to select which of three levels of program (basic, deluxe or premium) to use because the different programs are well described. After getting started, there is an option to import your information from other tax software which would have been helpful. I decided to do the return entirely from scratch to get the full review experience.
For the most part, completing the interview process was straightforward. What I particularly liked was that there were a lot of interview questions per page, more so than Turbo Tax and so there were fewer pages to scroll through. Another good support feature is that each page has a “help” section that directs you to more detailed information about that page’s topic. I used that feature a lot.
I also think the program is thorough – it found a deduction for our family that I missed last year when I did our taxes by hand – yikes, I will be amending last year’s return!
However, there were enough questions that were confusing that I grew increasingly concerned whether the information I was inputting was correct. For example, CompleteTax does not adequately address the topic of timing of the contribution to a health savings account (HSA). The form requests the following: “Enter the amount of after tax contributions you made to your health savings account in 2010.” I could not find any information on CompleteTax regarding whether later contributions (those made in 2011) which I plan on making, were to be included in the response to that question, whether later contributions were actually deductible or not, or whether a later contribution would be covered elsewhere in the program. I ended up going to the IRS website to determine that yes, contributions up to April 18, 2011 to a HSA could be deducted on the 2010 return, but I’m still not 100% sure I entered this information correctly.
Another example where I had trouble understanding the program is miscellaneous deductions. In the deduction section, the program covered some of the possible miscellaneous deductions, but not our biggest, which is our investment expenses. I couldn’t tell from the instructions whether or not to enter our investment expenses in the miscellaneous deductions section. After searching for a while, I learned that investment expenses are actually covered in the income section, with investments. While it’s not wrong to do it that way, it simply makes more sense to me to keep all deductions in one place, in the deduction section. The result was that I seemed to spend too much time just trying to figure out how and where to enter information.
My opinion regarding these lapses is that CompleteTax assumes that the user has more knowledge about tax preparation than I think most people have. I have been preparing our own returns for over twenty years and yet I thought that too many questions were confusing to be able to recommend this program for the average user, that is, someone who wants to quickly prepare his or her taxes and then forget about it until next year.
There are a couple of drawbacks that are related to CompleteTax being an online version. First of all, I like being able to look at the actual IRS form as I go as it gives some reassurance that I am answering the questions correctly or lets me determine before getting to the end that I’ve made an error somewhere. This feature is available on the Turbo Tax desktop version although not on the online version. Another advantage of the desktop version is that you can purchase one CD but complete multiple returns. With the Turbo Tax desktop version I can prepare returns for my children and parents for no additional cost. However, at least currently that cost savings may not be significant as CompleteTax has some favorable pricing for many people as mentioned below.
CompleteTax would be great for someone who is very knowledgeable about the tax laws and can understand the questions better than I could. I think a more knowledgeable person would appreciate the streamlined question process. Overall I think CompleteTax is a good product for the right user, someone who is knowledgeable about tax returns or has the time and the willingness to research the questions thoroughly. I, on the other hand, need a bit more handholding.
There’s just not enough advantage to me to switch to CompleteTax, and I actually prefer our usual provider. Also I like the desktop version for the advantages I previously mentioned. Certainly, however, CompleteTax was far better than trying to do my taxes by hand since it found deductions I would have missed, not to mention the time savings in getting calculations right the first time.
I do want to note that CompleteTax has some very advantageous pricing right now. It obviously is making a play to gain new customers with free software for those who owe the IRS, those who lost their jobs last year or those switching from three of the big tax software providers out there. I don’t know how long these offers will last; you can check it out at www.completetax.com.
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