Review by Long-Suffering Technology Consumer

…TurboTax can help ease the pain.

This is the 15th consecutive year I’ve used TurboTax for our state and federal returns. Over that time, Intuit has offered some better (and weaker) versions. The 2013 edition is as good as any I’ve used to date.

If asked to identify those chores that personal computing and online services have helped tame, I wouldn’t hesitate to place income tax preparation at the top of the list. Tax time before TurboTax used to be a three-day long parade of headache-inducing calculations, trips to the library for the correct forms, and the pain of the calculations from worksheets and schedules. While my tax situation has been relatively stable from year to year, TurboTax has compressed three days of extended misery over the correctness of my math to a much shorter period of compressed misery over the extent of my tax burden and interpreting IRS instructions. Intuit had rough period in the early 2000s with both privacy and functionality in TurboTax (and a STINGY approach to how many users could prepare taxes from a single copy). Happily, those days are far in the pastnnThis version allows you to prepare and E-File up to five federal returns. Installation was issue free and took less than 10 minutes in a Windows 7 machine (64-bit, Intel i7-3770 CPU @ 3.4 GHZ and 16 GB RAM). Updates since installation have also been painless. Because I had return data from last year’s edition on my computer already, our personal data was already filled in, and the program smartly queried about the same sources of income and interest and deductions/credits as last year.

With all of my tax documents at hand, and a moderately complex 1040 filing scenario, I was finished in less than an hour. Other than the fundamental pain that comes with tax time: what’s not to like about that?