Review by B. A. Zimmerman

I’ve used the HR Block Premium & Business software for about eight years now. The Business package is used for some family Trusts I manage and these Trusts hold actively managed investment accounts, each with over 80 securities transactions to report on Schedule D. My biggest beef with the software is no support for importing data to Form 8949 in order to populate Schedule D on a Form 1041 Trust return. So one has to either spend a month of Sundays manually keying in the data to TaxCut, or go pay a third party service where you can actually upload trading data you can download from your Financial institution to populate the Form 8949s and a Schedule D. Then you get to manually reconcile the totals from the third-party provided Schedule D in TaxCut software so you can proceed to file it all on paper (I’ve filed paper Trust returns of 90+ pages with all this crap). A very unsatisfying experience either way.

The online forums for this package are full of requests to address this problem and others, but nothing ever ever seems to be addressed or improved. They clearly don’t want to make their DIY products better. They want to drive you to hire them to do your return.

I’m one of the fortunate ones who hasn’t had insurmountable problems installing the software on my Windows 7 computer, but I wish this company would listen to their customers who, year-after-year-after year post requests to fix the same serious shortcomings with the product, yet never ever do it. I can only conclude that they don’t pay their engineers enough for them to invest their money in the markets, thus they don’t know what investors need in a Tax software package.