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Tax software

S

Smallville

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 1, 2004
147
0
Can anybody recommend a tax program for Mac?

Went to a HR Block last year and all the guy used was one of those Turbo Tax programs for Windows. And he charged us a good bit of money for that.
 
Smallville said:
Can anybody recommend a tax program for Mac?

Went to a HR Block last year and all the guy used was one of those Turbo Tax programs for Windows. And he charged us a good bit of money for that.
Click to expand...
I do taxes at Jackson-Hewitt, good seasonal second income.. and while I have no love for H&R Block (which is why I work for Jackson-Hewitt instead) I am pretty sure the software that H&R Block used is not just TurboTax. (Or in H&R Block's case, TaxCut, which they sell) Now, if your tax situation is not overly complex you might do just as well to USE something like Turbo Tax or TaxCut, but I sincerely doubt that is what they used.

As a side note, I have looked at TurboTax 2004, and it looks pretty good for federal. The Missouri state product isn't available yet, so I dunno if the state portion is as good. Missouri has heinously strange state taxes, so I am curious how well it will do them. I will do my return on TurboTax as well and see if the results come out the same as they do at work.
 
IndyGopher said:
I do taxes at Jackson-Hewitt, good seasonal second income.. and while I have no love for H&R Block (which is why I work for Jackson-Hewitt instead) I am pretty sure the software that H&R Block used is not just TurboTax. (Or in H&R Block's case, TaxCut, which they sell) Now, if your tax situation is not overly complex you might do just as well to USE something like Turbo Tax or TaxCut, but I sincerely doubt that is what they used.

As a side note, I have looked at TurboTax 2004, and it looks pretty good for federal. The Missouri state product isn't available yet, so I dunno if the state portion is as good. Missouri has heinously strange state taxes, so I am curious how well it will do them. I will do my return on TurboTax as well and see if the results come out the same as they do at work.
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Thanks for the advice.

I'm not sure how complicated our taxes will be. We have to file for Alabama and Idaho because we moved in June.

I also know that we were told we could claim a lot of my wife's medical expensese and/or prescriptions (she's diabetic).

Would trying to figure that out be worth the hassle or should we just go professional again?
 
try gnucash. You'll need to install download fink (have a look on versiontrack), and then install FinkCommander from within the fink dmg. search for gnucash from within that and install from the binary. Fairly simple (sounds more complex than it is).

Works a treat on linux, works fine under X11 on osx.

...open source too, aka Free Software!
 
I'm happy with TaxCut since it's less money and does more and they can spell my name correctly.
 
I've used TurboTax for the last 5 years with no problems, including one year when I was running a small business. I think it will cope pretty well with most individuals situations, unless there's a lot of complexity. The interview style data entry is pretty easy to follow, although being as I moved here from the UK I personally had to learn some new terminology which slowed me down, but the help screens are plentiful.

With TurboTax importing a lot of detail from the last years entries, I reckon I can complete my tax return (married, filing jointly) in just over 1 hour. My son can complete his return (single) in around 40 minutes.

You can also enter the cost of TurboTax as a deductible item, and with all the rebates you get, this brings the cost down quite a bit.

Hope this helps
 
i used turbotax for a few years before trying taxcut last year. i'm going back to turbotax...it had a better filing system than taxcut, and the layout/GUI is also better.
 
TurboTax all the Way! I have used it for 5+ years. I think that 1997 was the first time I paid taxes and I don't think that I hae ever used anything else.

One note about you Med. bill - to take a medical deduction your medical expences must total over 7.5% of your Adjusted Gross Income (AGI). So, for example if you and your wife made $30,000 last year your medical expences (which is the bills minus anything that your insurance paid for or was reimbursed from a flex spending account) must total at least $2,250. If your combined income was 100,000 you would need $7,500 in medical expense.

Depending on how you file married, head of house, single you can take a standard deduction of $9,700, $7,150, 4,850 resp.

Remember that you might be able to deduct your moving expences. It all depends on why you moved and how long you were employed before you moved. See IRS form 3903 for more info.

TurboTax is very good in my opinion at walking you through the Schedule A for your deductions.

Since we are talking about taxes - does anyone know how I can deduct the cost of my new PowerMac? I "had" :) to get it to finsh my photo class at school.

Doug

BTW - I am not a tax person - I just have been doing a lot of reading because I want to make sure that I get all my deductions. Make sure that you double check the things that I mentioned to make sure they apply to you. :) :)
 
DougJrS said:
TurboTax all the Way! I have used it for 5+ years. I think that 1997 was the first time I paid taxes and I don't think that I hae ever used anything else.

One note about you Med. bill - to take a medical deduction your medical expences must total over 7.5% of your Adjusted Gross Income (AGI). So, for example if you and your wife made $30,000 last year your medical expences (which is the bills minus anything that your insurance paid for or was reimbursed from a flex spending account) must total at least $2,250. If your combined income was 100,000 you would need $7,500 in medical expense.

Depending on how you file married, head of house, single you can take a standard deduction of $9,700, $7,150, 4,850 resp.

Remember that you might be able to deduct your moving expences. It all depends on why you moved and how long you were employed before you moved. See IRS form 3903 for more info.

TurboTax is very good in my opinion at walking you through the Schedule A for your deductions.

Since we are talking about taxes - does anyone know how I can deduct the cost of my new PowerMac? I "had" :) to get it to finsh my photo class at school.

Doug

BTW - I am not a tax person - I just have been doing a lot of reading because I want to make sure that I get all my deductions. Make sure that you double check the things that I mentioned to make sure they apply to you. :) :)
Click to expand...

Great info there.

In regards to your PB for school. Not sure about the deduction there. Yet however you used the PB for work, you may be able to claim it as a work expensive. Something about "for the connivence of the employer" in completing your job.
 
Glad I checked out this topic. Since I'm new to a Mac, I was wondering if there is a way to import last years tax information that I have on my old windows PC into TaxCut for Macs that I will be buying? I will tell you that I tried saving my last years tax information file to a CD-R and tried to open it OS X. I didn't get very far.
Any help will be greatly appreciated. :confused:
 
What does " I didn't get very far." mean? I don't use / like TaxCut so I am not sure exactly how the import would work.

If you are having problems burning a CD on the PC that the MAC will read make sure that you are burning the disk in ISO 9660 Joilet format. If you don't it create some PC only file format that the Mac cannot read.


Doug
 
I've used Intuit's MacinTax program for the past 6 years, and am quite happy with it. The Deluxe edition runs about $40, but gets you a free download of one state program and a free (via rebate) electronic filing. You can also claim the cost. It imports data from the prior year and from Quicken if you want, and takes me about 40 minutes to do our taxes (Married filing jointly, itemizing deductions). It walks you through the process nicely and efficiently, and even offers video tutorials if you want/need to use them.
 
Gadolie said:
Glad I checked out this topic. Since I'm new to a Mac, I was wondering if there is a way to import last years tax information that I have on my old windows PC into TaxCut for Macs that I will be buying? I will tell you that I tried saving my last years tax information file to a CD-R and tried to open it OS X. I didn't get very far.
Any help will be greatly appreciated. :confused:
Click to expand...

FWIW I just copied my previous years TurboTax file from my PC (across my network) to my new iMac. I just loaded the latest TurboTax onto my iMac and imported last years data with no problems, so it looks like the data files are transferrable in TT at least. Don't know about TaxCut though, although I thought both programs can import from each other.
 
blodwyn said:
FWIW I just copied my previous years TurboTax file from my PC (across my network) to my new iMac. I just loaded the latest TurboTax onto my iMac and imported last years data with no problems, so it looks like the data files are transferrable in TT at least. Don't know about TaxCut though, although I thought both programs can import from each other.
Click to expand...

Great news to hear. After years of Win TurboTax use, and now looking at doing on the Mac, I am happy to hear that importing of my data is no problem.
 
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