TurboTax ItsDeductible 2004
 | Average Customer Rating: Recommend ITSDEDUCTIBLE V2004 WIN… Product details and pricing info |
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5 Customer Reviews Posted
- IT'S DEDUCTABLE
- NOTHING TO INDICATE DEDUCTIONS THAT YOU MAY BE OVERLOOKING. NOTHING INDICATING THAT THE PROGRAM CAN ONLY BE USED TO TRACK DEDUCTIONS DURING 2004, AND CANNOT BE USED FOR ANYTHING IN ANY OTHER YEAR. REALLY NOT WORTH THE MONEY.
- 2005-03-18, 1 of 3 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- It's worse now than ever!
- Last year (2004), I used ItsDeductible for an entire year, keeping track of my donations of clothes, money, and other items. I was also able to use the software to keep track of my job-related expenses that are deductible (ie research expenses of a professor, job related journals, etc.) There was also a space to keep track of medical expenses. I loved it, and it saved me some money. I just received my new, *not* improved 2005 version, and suddenly, everything has changed. Basically, they made the software LESS useful. They have eliminated the medical expense and the professional expense sections, and now there is only the bare-bones charity donation record keeping. And even this has been drastically cut - many specific categories of clothing, for example, have been cut. Last year, I could be as specific as denim jeans or silk blouses - this year they are listed as "women's pants" and "women's shirts" with no variance in the price that they are "worth." Because of this, I am pretty skeptical that this would pass an audit, so I am now keeping extra records of these donations DESPITE buying the software. I suspect that the company could care less - what are the chances of an audit, anyway? It is probably cheaper for them to avoid refunds when consumers don't achieve the promised 500.00 savings than it is to fear the IRS audits, which are few and far between. Final word - rather than improved, this new version is worse. I could do just as well with a notebook and a quick check on ebay for values.
- 2005-03-11, 14 of 14 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- Too many items missing
- I just spent 1.5 hrs entering 80 items. Only half of my donated items were included in the ItsDeductible database. I had to manually enter the other half and estimate the value on my own.
Even with items such as clothes, I had to just pick an item from the database. It was rare that my donated item actually matched something in the database.
This software is not the cure-all that Intuit says it is. I should've saved my money and entered all of my donations in a spreadsheet like I did in previous years. - 2005-02-26, 12 of 12 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- Peace of Mind
- While the software could use a big user interface enhancement, it does the job and pays for itself many times over. If you give a lot of old belongings to charity it is invaluable and the dollar amounts are always more than I used to claim. I'm starting to feel like Clinton with his $10 underwear.
The peace of mind alone is worth $20. It also saves time if you use it year-after-year and give to the same charities. If you do there is no need to research and update their contact and tax info as it is automatically retained from prior years (and of course feeds TurboTax.
Intuit purchased ItsDeductible a couple of years ago. At the time it was already integrated (somewhat) with TurboTax. I'll be interested to see how this year's version is progressing. - 2005-02-04, 5 of 6 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- Very useful for some donations, but slow and unwieldy ...
- THE GOOD: If you donate clothing or other physical items to charity, you will find this program indispensable when it comes to calculating IRS-friendly dollar values. Over the summer my wife gave eight bags of clothing to our local Goodwill. Using ItsDeductible 2004 and her detailed receipt, it took me a mere 20 minutes to come up with a value for the hundred plus items in her donation. Additionally ItsDeductible also prompts you for lesser known deductions, like the number of miles you had to drive to drop off your charitable goods (the IRS gives you $.14 per mile).
THE BAD: ItsDeductible's user interface is clunky and unwieldy for cash donations (in the future I will stick to just entering those into a spreadsheet). Also the application takes its dear sweet time to launch and seams to run slowly; more than once I was typing faster than the words were appearing in the application.
THE UGLY: In my experience, tech support on this product is a joke. When I installed the program on my computer, it would not launch and instead gave a ten-digit error code. Looking that code up on the ItsDeductible website gave several possible solutions ... none of which worked. Eventually I called tech support, which was not easy as their hours are 6am to 3pm PST. After putting me on hold for twenty minutes, the tech finally told me that ItsDeductible would not launch if your computer's date format is set to anything other than M/D/YYYY. Arg! The application should have said that rather than give an unintelligible error code!
Overall I would recommend ItsDeductible to anyone who has given clothes, books, or other non-cash items to charity. If your charitable donations are primarily cash, I would recommend using an old-fashioned spreadsheet rather than ItsDeductible due to its inherent flaws. - 2005-01-25, 19 of 19 people found this review helpful, Rated:
