Review by Jaewoo Kim

With the advent of various tax softwares, it no longer makes sense to do taxes on paper. Even if you plan to file taxes by mail (not electronically), using a tax software such as Turbo Tax will minimize data entry and hassel of tax research. The only exception might be if you are a 1040EZ filer.

What separates Turbo Tax from its competitors is their attention to detail. They have made the user interface little more intuitive and went to great lengths to provide a user friendly GUI and pictures. Furthermore, they have made great strides in reducing data entry. For example, I was able to simply download the 1099-D (interest income) from my brokerage online and simply upload into Turbo Tax using a intuitive step-through. This saved me a LOT of time doing my taxes. You can also do this for your home mortgage interest payments etc.

At the end of the session, Turbo Tax gives a very intuitive graph of your audit risk and how your tax payments compare against rest of the population.