Regardless of the ‘Switch’ ads’ sanguine approach to entering the promised land of Mac OS X, there are some areas in which Mac use can be somewhat frustrating. One of these areas is financial software. Every year, at tax time, I am left wondering what features are going to be left out of the Mac version of either TurboTax or TaxCut, which one will have the most bugs this time, and which one will have the worst support for Mac users. Frankly, if you’re a Mac user, you will always get the short end of the stick when it comes to Intuit and H&R Block’s software. So, which stick is the better for Mac users for the 2002 tax year?

First off, if your needs are basic, and you don’t want to install software, a lot of users are reporting good results with online tax filing. Unfortunately, though, if you’re using a standards compliant browser such as any browser based on the Mozilla code base, there are some bugs in the interface. If you are of the anti-Microsoft persuasion, you might find it frustrating to have to use Internet Explorer. Otherwise, this should be your best option for the basic 1040.

However, if you run a home-business, use Quicken, QuickBooks, FirstEdge, or AccountEdge, or like the idea of being able to work on your taxes without having to be online (or simply would prefer to not store your tax information on Intuit’s servers), a software package is the right choice.

Basically, the two leading packages, TaxCut and TurboTax, do much the same thing. The advantage of TurboTax is that they seem to have signed up more financial institutions to participate with their software. So if you like the idea of being able to download your investment information or banking transactions directly from your online brokerage or online bank, and if your broker or bank is not in the top ten, you might find that TurboTax is the only program that will allow you to import what you need.

However, I have found the promise of downloading info from my financial institutions a bit of an oversold idea. It’s not as nice as you think. For one thing, you still have to classify the transactions, and they are often named in institutionalese, not in ways that help you make sense of what actually happened during that transaction. So, I find myself entering my transactions manually anyway. It helps that I also use Quicken for keeping track of most of my dealings, but even there, I enter all my transactions manually (partly because Windows-centric Intuit doesn’t have as many bells and whistles on the Mac side, and partly because of the aforementioned categorizing and naming issues).

Last year, I tried TaxCut for the first time, and found it to be an earnest, though lacking, Mac OS X citizen. It seems that this year, the Mac OS X side of things has been substantially ironed out. TurboTax, on the other hand, simply doesn’t seem to have been in the Quality Control department for very long. There are screen redraw issues, and date formatting issues (problems which will be familiar to users of Quicken for the Mac).

On the other hand, TaxCut has some hidden limitations which TurboTax neatly steps around. For example, if you have a lot of business tangible-asset depreciations, TurboTax will allow you to enter hundreds of them; however, TaxCut (2001. I have not yet tested 2002 in this regard) will limit you to less than a dozen, and the worst part is, that it won’t warn you about this until you’ve almost completed your tax filing. This means you have to go back and aggregate your deductions before listing them.

TurboTax holds your hand better, but also squeezes it a bit more tightly–meaning you have to follow their roadmap, often through dozens of screens where you keep clicking “no” just to get to the next applicable section. TaxCut,on the other hand, might leave you scratching your head a little from time to time, but is easier to navigate around, and features a more transparent interface: The ease of use does not come so much at the expense of control, like it does in TurboTax.

One big issue for the early filers out there: TaxCut will only have state forms ready by the end of February. If you want to polish off your state taxes before then, you’ll have to go with TurboTax.

The political: Neither company is an especially enlightened Mac-citizen. The interfaces aren’t very Mac like, and you have to pay more for Mac-versions (Intuit simply charges more for the Mac version while H&R Block gets their premium by forcing Mac users to buy the ‘Platinum’ edition, which at least gets you more features while being gouged.) Also, neither company seems intent on making sure their financial partners (online brokerages and banks) support the Mac either. A shame, really, and awfully old-fashioned, in a day of business-service transparency and XML. That said, Intuit also enforces a licensing scheme which is more restrictive (some would say Draconian) than H&R Block’s, and there have been reports that installing Intuit’s product also installs some spyware on your machine.

In summary then, the balance tips in TaxCut’s favor, being $10 cheaper, having a slightly more open interface, and giving more control to the end user through not having intrusive copy-protection schemes. However, if you want to file your taxes before the end of February, TurboTax is your choice.

BTW: There are other software packages out there. You can see a complete list at <http://www.irs.gov/efile/lists/0,,id=101139,00.html>.