General Business: Tax prep - software?

TurboTax or TaxCut? Anyone use an actual accountant?

Hi,

For the first six years I ran my business, I hired a CPA to do my taxes. I think I used three or four different CPAs in that period of time, because each one kept making inexcusable mistakes. One left off my W-2 (he claimed because I was a "new customer"), another preferred to write the forms in illegible longhand for his $800 fee, and another simply didn't ask any questions, which made me wonder if my recordkeeping was perfect, or if he was simply incompetent.

So, to make a long story short, I wrote my own tax software. I sat down with IRS publications and thirty-page forms from the State of Massachusetts and old sales tax returns from the State of Ohio, and integrated code into the accounting software I'd already written to make my program do my taxes for me in PDF format. And when my payroll company revealed the social security numbers and salaries of all of its customers, 25,000 to 100,000 in all, I made my program do payroll, too. So now I don't depend on anyone for accounting or payroll. It took forever and it's far more accurate than the CPAs ever were--I typed in every transaction over eight years, and now see that they were off by tens of thousands of dollars, causing me to overpay on my income tax returns--but I can't seem to convince anyone to use it since Intuit has the market cornered.

I even went to Intuit to do a beta test of one of their upcoming products, and ended up showing it to them. They were "impressed," but not "interested."

And so it goes...

Aaron

Yeah, I think Aaron wins. lol. I'm impressed.

I usually stuff my invoices into a bottle, throw it in the Lake and hope it floats to my accountant.

You may find some inspiration and marketing tips on Bob Parson's blog (GoDaddy founder). In particular, read his first company's trials and tribulations.