TurboTax Premier 2004 [Old Version]

List Price: $69.95 Discount Price: $79.98

Features:

• Tax preparation software with step-by-step guidance and free electronic filing
• Help and advice for investments, Schedule C businesses, and rental property
• Extra guidance on business asset depreciation and home-office deductions
• Assistance with reporting stocks, bonds, and mutual funds
• Maximize 401(k) contributions without decreasing take-home pay

Customer Reviews:

Not perfect, but gets the job done [Posted on 2005-04-05]
This was my first year doing taxes for myself. I've always been skeptical about using software to get them done, so I usually pay too much to a CPA to do them for me. After a lot of encouragement from friends I decided to give this a try. Other than some ESPP sales, my return was pretty simple. I bought the Premier version.

What I liked:

- Nice interview process. Of course, it helped that I had prior year returns that had been prepared by a professional, so I kind of knew what the questions meant.
- Easy import of W2 and 1099 information.
- A check to make sure the return contained no errors.
- Online support from Intuit was very prompt.

Some things I would have liked to see:

- There's a screen where it tells you how much you can contribute to a Roth IRA, but it doesn't put the information on the instruction sheet when you print the return for filing. That would be useful.

Bugs that I encountered:

Basically lots of printing-related bugs.
- When I tried to print from the file->print menu, and asked it to print a return for filing, it only printed the federal return. I had to go to the "print" tab and print return for filing to PDF, and then it printed both federal and state.
- I had the same problem when using the file->print menu to print a copy of the returns and worksheets for personal records. So I just printed the federal portion using this.
- The method for printing the copy for records (including worksheets) to pdf was not as straightforward as when printing the return for filing. I couldn't figure it out so I used Intuit's online support. However, even thought I followed the instructions from them, I found that it did not print all of the worksheets. I contacted them about this and was told to just print to paper. So I have to live without a pdf copy of my return containing all the worksheets.

turbo tax premier 2004 [Posted on 2005-04-15]
Bummed I couldn't find the home and business (guess their not making it anymore) This program wouldn't allow me to import information from previous years. I've always been able to transfer from last years Turbo tax home and business forms. I had to re-type everything manually. No prompt to do it and when I went to the pull down menu I couldn't prompt it to import data. Not user friendly, it used to be better.

Intuit Customer Support Lacking [Posted on 2005-04-27]
Received TurboTax Premier disc from Amazon. During installation, kept getting different installation errors. Intuit website posted SEVERAL options as work-arounds. Spent too much time trying to fix what ended up being a defective disc. On-line chat w/ Intuit rep was frustrating, at best. Intuit would not ship replacment disc direct since Amazon is not an "authorized" seller. Amazon shipped replacement disc (took too many days, Amazon).
Response on Intuit's website about TurboTax completely unacceptable. Defective product and not ready for market. Have used TT for 15 years - won't be using it next year.

Petrified of taxes--TurboTax helped me through [Posted on 2005-08-26]
This last year was my first year of filing taxes for a rental, a sole-proprietorship, and the various small jobs I'd held, plus my husband's new job. It was a potential nightmare and I spent several restless nights thinking about it. Under recommendations from a bookkeeper friend, I bought TurboTax. It was great and I was able to get a significant return, which made the time it took to work through the sessions more than worth it. I finished my taxes in about four days, and for anyone with several PT jobs or potential complications, I'd recommend setting aside a couple hours a day--TT allows you to stop any session at any point and save the data, which lets you go back and proofread or reenter data as you wish. I could have finished my taxes without TT, but I highly doubt I would have saved much. TT's deduction questionaires. I can't compare it to earlier versions, since this is my first year using it, but I was very pleased and I think that if you have several different sources of income, TT really helps you organize. In terms of user-friendliness, I think it was fairly straightforward. I used the Help menu a lot and was able to turn on and off the questionaire when I wanted to. If you are new to taxes or TT, then I'd recommend working through it over a period of a week or so, just to verify all your information and think about possible deductions that you might be missing. Because of TT, I am now organizing all my receipts for my businesses in the categories that it suggested for deductions and feel fairly confident about next year's tax season.

Easy to use [Posted on 2008-04-01]
Even though no one is going to be buying this version (2004), I decided to review it anyway (reviewing all items I've ever purchased/used).

Unlike the current version (2007) of TurboTax, this one worked flawlessly. It installed quickly and was not a resource hog. Using it was very easy. Just answered the questions, plugged in the numbers and it did all the work. It was a bit of a pain to manually enter all my stock trades as I was an active trader at the time. Still, it calculated everything when I was done and I was able to efile my taxes quickly.

I had no real complaints.

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