Almost A Review: TurboTax

      As it is that time of year again, I’ve recently finished my income taxes. While I could say much about tax policy, ethics and practicality, this isn’t the place. No, here I talk about the filling out of the forms. Or put slightly differently, the tools used to fill out the forms. Although I should get some disclaimers out of the way before continuing.

Disclaimer 1: I am not an accountant. I am not offering financial advice, tax preparation advice, or anything similar. Use what I say at your own peril.

Disclaimer 2: As the signature line at the bottom says “to the best of my knowledge and belief” the information is “true, correct, and accurately”. But I could be wrong, which leads us to…

Corollary to Disclaimer 2: My taxes are almost certainly wrong. The laws were created by flawed and imperfect being (foolish mortals, if you will). The tools I use (software) were created by another group of foolish mortals. And I am also a foolish mortal. The likelihood that all of us got it right on all accounts is essentially impossible. Which means that something must be ‘wrong’ on my tax forms. Could I tell you what it is? And more importantly, could I do anything to correct it? Not as far as I can tell. Hence “to the best of my knowledge”.

      That out of the way, on to the fun of forms.

      Might be worth mentioning that I have never actually done taxes with pen and paper. I’ve always used software on a computer. A collection of tools for various parts of the job. I use TurboTax for the direct filing of taxes, GnuCash for general accountant software as the year goes by, and LibreOffice for spreadsheets as a general scratchpad. Any forms that may show up by mail get fed into a scanner. End result, no portion of my taxes exists physically, it’s all data on a computer.

      If it wasn’t for the painful payment portion at the end, the process is almost a game. Gather data, shuffle it around, fill out forms, ponder ways to optimize for the future, etc. Unfortunately, at the end there is that payment, which does take most of the fun out of it. At least by most definitions of ‘fun‘.

Playing the ‘Game’

      I don’t know how most people play this ‘game’, but I usually start in last January. First steps are getting a copy of TurboTax, and building the environment to run it in. Because you can never be too paranoid, I run TurboTax in a virtual environment. This lets me control when it can talk to the internet, and what data it has access too.

      Which then goes to the actually filling out of forms. TurboTax does the heavy lifting here. Just go through the forms, pulling information from GnuCash and feeding it into TurboTax. Answering questions and such as needed. Due to the way it can import last years data for a head start, it doesn’t take that long.

      So sometime in early February I will be ready to file taxes. But I won’t, not yet. Instead I let the forms pile up until the legal deadline for their production is past. Give it a day or two for mailing, then double check if any of the numbers have actually changed. Usually a few dollars move from column ‘a’ to column ‘b’ (or vice verse), but nothing I would call substantial.

      At which point, then I file. Which again, TurboTax makes simple enough. Even sends emails when the government is happy with it’s pound of flesh.

      Simple enough process, doesn’t take that much time, almost not worth even noting. Except for the tools…

      TurboTax makes it rather simple to fill out the forms that are income taxes. Points you towards potential ways to lower those same taxes. Good explanations, if you don’t know what a particular item is referring to. Not the same level of hand holding I would expect from an actual person, but it does a pretty good job explaining things and walking you through the process.

      And, so long as you haven’t filed your finished work, you can adjust things. Which does lend itself to playing some ‘what if’ games.

      If I made more/less money in this way, taxes do what? If I spent money on something, could it count somewhere, and if so, that changes what? At the moment, those questions do nothing, the expense/revenue is unchanged. But it can help with future considerations. Or all those details can be ignored and you just stick in numbers.

The Real Reason

      And while all of the above is nice, I think the biggest benefit of TurboTax is peace of mind. As mentioned in the disclaimers above, I am confident there are mistakes. But, thanks to the help with the forms, and reading through the help menus, I can be reasonable confident the results are reasonable accurate. Perfect? Of course not. But I can sleep well knowing it should be close enough.

      Or put differently, taxes are a fictional story. As the saying goes, ‘by making us pay taxes, the government makes us all liars’. But thanks to the tools available, I can be hopeful that fiction isn’t too far off from fact. Or at least as close as humanly possible.