Investor Junkie is your shortcut to financial freedom. We analyze and compare tools to help you make the best decisions for your personal financial situation. You can also pay for your tax prep with your refund. Is owned by Intuit, the same company that owns QuickBooks, Credit Karma, and personal finance software Mint. The Free online edition should suit you just fine if you have only W-2 income and/or unemployment income, and you rent your home. We recommend the best products through an independent review process, and advertisers do not influence our picks.

TurboTax also does a great job of keeping you engaged in the process and preventing you from mindlessly clicking past important details. Its entry forms switch between boxes that look like nicer IRS forms, nested lists of categories you can explore, animated loading screens, and yes-or-no or multiple-choice questions. Her research builds on the deep reporting of Melanie Pinola, who has written extensively about personal finance for sites such as Lifehacker, SmartAsset, and MyBankTracker. She has covered topics including when to hire a tax pro, the biggest deductions you should claim, and what to do to make the audit process less stressful. And, yes, she’s done head-to-head tax-software comparisons.

Compare the best tax software of 2023

In addition to having a special version of TurboTax for self-employed people, the company has enhanced existing tools and help and added new functionality since the previous tax year. For example, TurboTax prefills as many fields as possible and uses AI to become smarter about individual needs. It personalizes expense reporting by suggesting items frequently claimed by various professions. A vertical navigation bar on the left divides the site into My Info, Federal, State, Review, and File.

The best way to get specialized help is usually to upgrade to a more expensive TurboTax Live package. After entering an income total, I moved on to expenses. TurboTax displayed a list of five common expense categories for my profession on the next screen with examples of expenses for each. I checked the applicable ones, and TurboTax walked me through the process of reporting those expenses. The other two main sections of the TurboTax Q&A (Other Tax Situations and Deductions & Credits) work the same way. If you make your way through your tax return sequentially, answering all the questions, you shouldn't get lost, even if you have to use the Back button occasionally.

Deluxe: Best for maximizing deductions and credits

Both Deluxe options include deduction-finding software, help with charitable donations and access to tax financial experts through online chat. Small-business owners, active stock traders, and those with complex real estate situations are best turbotax which one do i need served by a professional tax preparer. In these cases, there are simply more chances to miss valuable deductions if you prepare your return yourself, and the results probably aren’t worth the time you’d spend entering all the information.

For more tips on how to keep important documents in order, read our guide on how to organize your digital files. But your mileage may vary, of course, and it can take work to find a good accountant or tax pro. The last tax pro Kaitlyn hired failed to account for all of her family’s medical expenses and incorrectly assigned them the standard deduction, instead of the more-beneficial itemized deduction. As is true of finding a trustworthy dentist or home-improvement contractor, asking people you know for references is usually a good way to go. Occasionally, we ran into prompts that required us to manually enter each line of data on separate pages, rather than entering each line on the same page, like a spreadsheet. This can be a time-consuming hassle if, say, you’re filing a Schedule C and need to report several categories of business expenses.

H&R Block Free Online vs. TurboTax Free Edition: Get More FREE with Block

Her first picture book, A Family Looks Like Love, follows a pup who learns that love, rather than how you look, is what makes a family. Once you have all of your tax paperwork, file early, and consider opting in to the IRS’s IP PIN service to protect your identity. But as we found during 2019’s testing, the automated help was not helpful , and reaching a live agent was difficult and time-consuming. When you click any of the numerous question-mark boxes in TurboTax’s web app, it opens a pop-up that usually answers any questions you might have about the given subject. The search function should cover most everything else, since TurboTax staff and community members have answered a litany of questions about even the smallest of details. TurboTax’s explanations may not seem revelatory, but they can help to assure you that you’re filing correctly and potentially catch typos or glitches.

You may also want the additional expertise of an accountant if you have had any conflict with the IRS in the past. An itemized 1040 and a state return cost an average of $323 to be prepared by an accountant in 2020, according to the National Society of Accountants. If you need help using TurboTax for LLC, you can post your legal need on UpCounsel's marketplace. UpCounsel accepts only the top 5 percent of lawyers to its site. Lawyers on UpCounsel come from law schools such as Harvard Law and Yale Law and average 14 years of legal experience, including work with or on behalf of companies like Google, Menlo Ventures, and Airbnb.

Eventually they added different versions and then the totally online option. Totally online seemed logical because you start for free and then are told ttps://turbo-tax.org/ which version you need to pay for, given the forms you used. But that is crazy if a downloaded basic desktop version contains all of the forms.

Intuit’s active user rates peak sharply during tax season. In order to increase engagement year-round, they need their TurboTax users to adopt other products in their suite. This value-adding follow-up email and simple landing page encourage users to expand to a secondary use case in a way that feels natural and logical, rather than pushy. At the top of the screen, there is a preview of how large a refund the user can expect at the federal and state levels.

How to Find the Best CPA or Tax Accountant Near You

It often provides brief, simple explanations of tax topics while asking you questions. Many hyperlinked words and phrases open windows containing additional detail. Once you create an account or sign in with an existing one, the website helps you select the correct tier of service for your 2022 taxes. It displays several life situations, such as owning a home, having children, selling stocks, paying off student loans, and so on. Based on your answers, the website recommends the most appropriate edition of TurboTax. You never have to look at an IRS form or schedule, because TurboTax and other online tax prep services complete them for you in the background.

• Though TurboTax originated this trend of using a wizard-based approach to tax preparation, the practice has evolved substantially over the years.
• For more peace of mind, you might instead want to work with a Certified Public Accountant .
• These products rangefrom $59 to $119 and aim to help consumers save money through deductions and charitable contributions.
• The Ascent is a Motley Fool service that rates and reviews essential products for your everyday money matters.
• H&R Block’s summary screens act like milestones within the tax-preparation process.

In general, the customer service options available through FreeTaxUSA are fairly limited. You get free access to the customer support page, and if you pay for the Deluxe version, you can get chat support or use the searchable Q&A database. However, direct customer support isn’t very accessible, so if you’re looking for a great deal of help, you’re not likely to find it with FreeTaxUSA. TurboTax and FreeTaxUSA both offer DIY audit support, meaning you get help learning how to respond to the IRS.