Folks, anyone here use Quicktax for the Mac? I have used it for years and I have been satisfied. But for 2004 tax year the product is no longer available. In Intuit's words "due to the growing popularity and demand for online applications among Mac users". So now we can only use their web tool.
A few questions:
1) Anyone here who used Quicktax consulted by Intuit on what they wanted for 2004? ( I was not consulted and I do not want to use the web tool).
2) Anyone a little skeptical on their security for hosting your tax info?
3) Suggestions for alternative packages?
4) Anyone else insulted that they are trying to blame their decision on us? (I would have more respect if they just said it was no longer profitable).
If you want a Mac X application to compute (and if you wish, NetFile) your own tax return, you might try TaxTron, formerly called GriffTax. I have used it for about five years and would recommend it enthusiastically.
After telling my mother that she should be using a computer to do her taxes her and I struggled through 2 days of QuickTax 2004 hell. We finally returned that damn thing because we could not get it to work completely (kept crashing classic, had to run it on native OS9) on several Macs. So after returning it and being issued a refund I popped off an email to Intuit to voice my opinion. Here is the reply I got last April:
---
As a Mac user here in a sea of Windows computers, I feel your pain.
The good news is we are working on a native OS X version as we
speak.
The plan is to get it out for next year. That's not a promise, just
what is planned! As you can imagine, the vast majority of our sales
are to Windows users which means that the vast majority of our
development dollars are spent on the Windows product. In the past
we've been able to reuse a huge amount of the Windows code - which
is good because Mac users get the benefit of all the development and
quality assurance effort that goes into the Windows product. The
tools we use to effect that reuse work only in the "Classic"
environment, so we have to rewrite them to work native in OS X -
that's turned out to be quite a bit of work that needs to be done.
Regards,
-Kent M
Tax Technical Support
Intuit Canada Ltd.
---
Good thing he didn't promise us anything. Oh well, so they dump macs for a while, they'll be miles behind when macs take over the world. I still prefer to submit my taxes the ol'fashion way - in crayon...
If you want a Mac X application to compute (and if you wish, NetFile) your own tax return, you might try TaxTron, formerly called GriffTax. I have used it for about five years and would recommend it enthusiastically.
I tried the demo of Grifftax / Taxtron and found it lousy. It looks like it's an ancient Hypercard program. Ugly. Cumbersome. Not well-suited to what-if analysis, which is why I use a tax program to do my taxes in the first place.
I too discovered that QuickTax is dead for Mac users and I am really ticked off to say the least! I received an advertising letter written in french which was strange but no mention of the end of QuicTax for Mac users. Intuit is continuing their support for the US version for Mac users but not for Canadians. I will have to input all new data and loose all my carry forward information to boot. I do at least 10 returns, all for family. I downloaded TaxTron and it is a classic App. (Tip: in order to get the installer to run without errors you must highlight the installer icon> get info>click open as a classic app.) The problem for me with my iMac G5 and 20 inch screen is the font size is very small and there doesn't seem to be any way to enlarge it. I tried changing fonts too. I'm not sure I'm crazy about the fact that my tax info would be stored on intuits servers, not to mention the info of my family members who have trusted me with their information, so I'm not sure what to do.
We are at their mercy!
EJR
The problem for me with my iMac G5 and 20 inch screen is the font size is very small and there doesn't seem to be any way to enlarge it. I tried changing fonts too.
EJR
Set the resolution of the monitor to something lower. Exactly half of the resolution would be clearest (if possible). The other option is to use the magnification built into MacOS X.
For what it's worth, in case anybody from Intuit is watching, this will be the first year since '96 that I haven't used their product, still have the floppies. They did this a few years ago and then showed up with a Mac version. One can only hope.
I'm interested in the discussions if anybody knows if there are other versions out there, or even Revenue Canada's.
For what it's worth, in case anybody from Intuit is watching
And let me add that Intuit would see more Mac sales if they actually released the product before the RRSP deadline and charged the same as the PC version, or at least only a few dollars more.
Thanks hayesk,
I'll play with the resolution. The font is quite blurry when I changed it but maybe I can tweak it. The Magnification doesn't work in classic, seemed fine in OSX.
EJR
Linear Mode
