TaxCut Platinum 2002

First of all, Tax Cut's Mac State products will not be out till February 28th (you have to really dig deep in their site to discover this). This contradicts other information given by their site and by customer support that indicates it is available now.

Also, at present, the most current (Feb 6th) updated Mac version of the Federal Tax Cut has a bug which prevents you from passing the review (you can not file). The Error indicates you should upgrade to the newest version available mid-January. I just sent this error report in to them last night, so I can only guess when it will be fixed.

Finally, the program is not a nice a product as Turbo Tax is (or at least, as last year's was). The implementation is crude. Video help had decompression problems. But worst of all, every time you double-click a word that you want defined you have to go out to the taxcut.com website to see the result. Please.... How hard would it have been to define these terms within the program? Thank goodness I have a cable modem, always on, connection.

It is really so bad that if my e-mails to TaxCut do not get resolution in a few days, I am going to just eat the cost of this poor product and pay the extra $.. and by this years Turbo Tax for Mac.

I'll update this review and make it more positive if I receive positive resolution, but if I bail, I am going to let this one stand.


extra download for update   February 7, 2003
2 out of 3 found this review helpful

I purchased TaxCut instead of TurboTax because TurboTax required initialization over the internet to use it. My daughter and I both use the program and TaxCut allows up to 5 family members usage. I DID NOT like the fact that I had to download updates to both this and the State program that took almost an hour to do. Also the State program did not recognize that Harford County has only three incorporated towns and gave me an error message to list my town. I thought it should have been aware of all local information.


What a nightmare!   February 7, 2003
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

I had been a user of TurboTax for several years and was very satisfied with the results and ease of use. I had logged on one day to pick up a copy of Turbotax but based upon some of the reviews here I decided to get Taxcut. Big mistake. Taxcut is very buggy and it even locked up when I was first trying to register it online.

I had already calculated my taxes based using my tax info from 2002 and Turbotax deluxe 2001. I figured it should give me a ball park figure since tax laws can't change that much in one year.

At any rate TT estimated I should pay in a small amount. When I entered all the numbers in with Taxcut platinum it showed me as having in pay in almost tens times as much. I re-entered the data several times and it would give me different results but always on the high side. I even completed a brand new form and made sure I had the latest sotware update. It said I had the latest update but still yielded very high info on taxes and it wasn't a consistant number even though my tax info was constant.

Finally after messing around with this for about ten hours I decided I would just uninstall everything and throw the software disk and everything associated with Taxcut in the trash. Hopefully I can wipe this nightmare completely from my memory.

I ordered Turbotax today and I will used that program this year.

Taxcut is not a very user friendly program and in some of the interview questions it was mising a specific line number to get info from. Also, the look and feel of this program is a bit on the edge of being amateur/professional. Very similar to some of the shareware programs you can find where somebody wrote the program from their basement. It may be just a cut above that.

Looking back on some of the reviews of TT the negative on the product had more to do with the activation process rather than how the program performed.

If Taxcut has worked fine for you for years than stick with it but I am never going to touch this program again. I should have know better than to change something that was working fine for me.