H&R Block At Home 2009 Premium Federal + State + eFile
April 6th, 2010 by admin | Filed under life logistics.![H&R Block At Home 2009 Premium Federal + State + eFile [Formerly TaxCut] [Download]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41M7lTaUXsL._SL500_AA300_.jpg)
H&R Block At Home Premium includes everything you need to easily complete your federal and state taxes, plus five free federal e-files. Everything you need to easily complete your federal and state taxes. Click to enlarge. Guidance for reporting investments, dividends, home sales, and retirement income. Click to enlarge. Personalized tax guidance for popular occupations… Click to enlarge. …and specific deductions Click to enlarge. With a new, easy-to-use interface, H&R Block At Home Premium searches for hundreds of deductions to get customers the biggest refund. Ideal for homeowners, investors, rental property owners, and self-employed Schedule C filers, the program includes features available only from H&R Blo [Read More...]
Buy H&R Block At Home 2009 Premium Federal + State + eFile at Amazon
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This program was very easy to us, and it was surprisingly easy to go back and change things after half filling it in. I filled out most of the form long before I got my W-2 and 1099s, and going back was no problem. When going back in the form, the only thing I recommend is using the tabs to go to the right section (”Personal”, “Dependents”, “Income”, “Adjustments”, etc.) and then clicking on the “Go To” link for the _summary_ of that category. This allows you to hone right in on what you want to find; it’s easy to get stuck in the linear input process if you don’t use some direction.
The biggest problem was that you have to find the “key code” that comes with this version of the program, allowing for 5 free e-files. All the in-program help said that if you downloaded the program, the code would be mailed to you, and it even showed what such an email might look like. I checked the email I have registered with Amazon, and my email I might have put in during registration (I couldn’t remember if there had been a registration process), and I couldn’t find the “key code”. It turns out that there is no email. …you need to go to the Amazon folder that gets put in your Start Menu, as a part of installing the downloader. In that folder (”Amazon”–>”Amazon Games & Software”) there is an icon labelled “Go to Your Games & Software Library”. If you click on that, then click to “view order key”, it will show you the “key code”. The key code does not look like the example that H&R Block shows you (”ABCD-1234″), it _is_ four characters -dash- four characters, but it’s totally random looking (not letters on one side and numbers on the other — e.g. “HQ8F1-RG29L” — I almost didn’t recognize it after looking at the example that H&R Block had in their Help text).
I used TurboTax last year. I switched this year to H&R Block At Home because I wasn’t happy with it and someone in a review had mentioned this program. I am much happier with H&R Block than TurboTax — it seems much less like a random series of questions, and I can guess what it’s getting at on the forms when it’ asking me questions.
I have been using this product since 2004. I liked it better than Intuit’s TaxCut when I compared them head to head.
Sure, it was clunky, but it seemed to have the tax code down pat and the step by step methodology was effective.
This year H&R Block renamed the product and put a slightly slicker interface on the product. Unfortunately, they seemed to have missed a few things under the hood.
I’ve spent about three hours with the software this evening and have found two problems. One minor and one major. They are both related to the sale of our old house and purchase of another house in 2009.
The minor issue is that the software makes it easy to enter the data to support a home office deduction. For the last two years we have been claiming my wife’s office as it was qualified in all respects. We sold that house last year and while doing the interview on the sale, it wanted me to calculate who much depreciation IT calculated in prior years. Umm, if the darn software can read last year’s return, surely it could extract last year’s depreciation. It would be reasonable to expect it to ask for other Taxcut save files to extract add’l years depreciation. But it can’t/won’t. That’s minor compared to my next discovery.
We have read and re-read IRS publication 5405 - related to the Federal Homebuyer’s credit. The form seems clear. We appear to be eligible for $6500 for helping the economy. A nice surprise! The software even has the right IRS form, with the right date, and it calculates correctly. Yet…..the INTERVIEW doesn’t address the November 2009 extension covering existing homebuyers hwo buy a new home. That’s looking like a defect to me.
So, I availed myself of the support options:
1. I called the 800 # (nice that it’s 24×7 this time of year). Waited a modest 4 minutes, and a nice lady with perfect English. She asked for my email, and then we were disconnected.
2. Good thing I also had the CHAT page up and another tech showed up. I explained the issue and he asked me to double check that the software was indeed up to date (I told the software to update 3 times). All he could offer was an apology and did not know of anyway for me to report what appears to be a defect. He did offer that if I filed and there was an error and a fine, H&R Block would cover me up to $10,000. I explained an omission may be an error, but it there wouldn’t be a fine. Thus H&R Block was not going to cover this situation.
Frankly, if I finish my return using this software I’m going to need whiteout to add the credit when I follow the IRS requirement to print the return (and supporting documents) and mail it in. [DRG - see updated notes below].
I hope this is so obvious that H&RB knows about it - perhaps the economy is so bad I’m their only customer fortunate enough to buy a house this year? I don’t know. I’m going to give their corporate office a call tomorrow and see what happens when I “ask for the President’s office”. If that doesn’t work then Amazon can refund my money and Intuit can suck me a little bit drier as I’ll have to become one of their Zombies this year.
Updated 3/1/2010
I called their HQ during the day and asked for a manager, after some quick forwarding I was talking to a manager and explained the situation and why I felt that there was an incomplete feature. The outcome was two fold:
1. I was shown that you can use the attached IRS forms in lieu of the interview. The credit did calculate correctly - I just have to avoid using that particular interview.
2. I spoke with a support tech who knew how to handle tech savvy customers and professionally represent his company. After taking exquisite notes, and reading them back to me, he assured me that they were going to get this over to “engineering”. I believe him.
So I continue on feeling much better about the situation.