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I’ve always done my own taxes and there’s no better way to do that than with tax preparation software. I’ve used both Intuit’s TurboTax and H&R Block’s TaxCut software. This year, I decided to try both! (No, I don’t enjoy doing taxes — I promise.) The goal would be to see if there’s any difference in my refund that either software package calculates.

I received a copy of both TurboTax Deluxe Federal+State and TaxCut Premium Federal + State in the mail. Turbo Tax even allowed you to “try before you buy” so I decided to take them up on the offer. I created a virtual machine and proceeded to install TurboTax Deluxe. Next up was TaxCut. I put the CD in and ran the installer. Unfortunately, H&R makes you purchase the software before you can install it. Since my goal was to compare refunds between the two, I didn’t want to commit to either until I knew what my refund would be. If there was no difference, I would choose the cheaper solution (TaxCut). Taxcut does offer a free version of TaxCut Basic. It doesn’t include an e-file, but that’s not the point. I just wanted to see what my federal return would be.

On to the fun part: entering data. I was able to import my 2005 tax file into both TurboTax and TaxCut without a problem. Both software guides you through the whole process. At the beginning, I thought TaxCut was actually nicer. It asked if I had any “life changes” such as getting married, and then guided you through each section. TurboTax just had a form with radio buttons. “Single | Married”. After that, however, I thought TurboTax did a better job in organizing questions and explaining what things meant.

So what was the final result? After making sure that I answered all the questions exactly the same, I found that TaxCut gave me $50 more on my refund than TurboTax. Go figure? I purchased TaxCut Premium Federal + State. Not only did it give me $50 more on my refund, but it costs $15 - $20 less than TurboTax Deluxe. I figure I saved $65 - $70 by going with TaxCut.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 at 5:57 pm and is filed under software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.