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 - Turbo TaxHave used this product for seven years. It is the class of the field. No question about it. Rating: - GeneralI have been a beta tester for Quicken (Windows) for a number of years. Each year I think "I don't think anything can be improved over last year's." And each year new additions and improvements are made. I have been using the final version for a month and I have no complaints and I am very happy with its performance. RDA Rating:  - Quicken 2009 Premium Home & Business - (from a beta tester)I have been a Quicken Home & Business beta tester for several years now and a user of the product for many more years than that. In testing and using the new version of 2009, there was one clear enhancement that I think is worth the purchase all by itself, and that this version let's you customize the product in just about every manner to suit your tastes, how you use the product, and even just the visual appeal. This is important, because, unfortunately, as products like Quicken & competitors add features, it can get cumbersome, especially if you don't use all of the plethora of features. You can eliminate the screen clutter by customizing, so you don't lose functionality, but you can choose to use only what you want. From a quality perspective, being a beta tester for this product, as well as an IT Professional who beta tests other types of products, I have to note that the 1st wave of the beta test product came out very clean (from a software bug perspective). This is key to me as it shows Intuit did its' due-diligence in internal testing before releasing it to the beta testers. Software quality is something clearly lacking in the industry now, (look at all patches, fixes, etc) and these can be security problems. I'm not saying there won't be any patches for Quicken, but it was refreshing. There are also a bunch of other enhancements, that I'm sure have been posted, and I'm sure some people will not feel they are necessary, while others will, so I won't debate that, but it has changed quite a bit from even the 2008 version, so if you are before that version (or even at that version) it is worth considering (especially since you can make it more user friendly to yourself via the customizations). The only faults I find in the product (which ARE NOT new to the 2009 version), is that it should have a more robust home & inventory manager (I believe this may be a separate Intuit product now, but should be a part of this product). The other point is that I have a small partnership LLC company. My volume is low that it approximates that of a well-established sole-proprietorship, but not very heavy. As a result, I really do not need the double-entry features of Quickbooks, but because I don't use Quickbooks, I cannot automatically export the Business information to Turbotax Business (and I cannot use Turbotax Home & Bus because it doesn't accommodate anything other than a Schedule C sole proprietorship. Hence, I'm forced to buy Quickbooks and Turbo-Tax Business OR manually move my BUS numbers from Quicken to Turbotax Bus. It still moves all of my personal information over to Turbotax, but I'd like to see Intuit try to accommodate some of the smaller partnerships and LLCs in the H&B product. That's not a technical problem though, just a personal issue. Lastly, and this is not for Intuit, is that many people are now members of Warehouse clubs (eg Costco, Sams, BJs), and/or use Supermarket frequent shopper cards. Seeing that these companies gain valuable marketing and logistics information from us allowing them to collect personal information on what we purchase, I'd like to be able to download that information into Quicken as well. Realistically, if you fill up a shopping cart with products at A&P, do you go home and enter every single product/category into Quicken as a Split transaction??? This service would be great to assist in budgeting and seeing where money goes down to a granular level. (If anyone knows how to get this info, please share). Hopefully some of this review will help some of you. Rating:  - Same old same oldDoesn't work with older versions of Quicken, and no upgrade path for folks with older versions who now have Macs. Rating:  - Not for stock day traders and Mac users! Worse than last years.If you're a day trader (and a Mac user), you might be better off filling out your tax return by hand. Something changed this year in TurboTax that doesn't allow you to quickly input your stock transactions. And TurboTax seems to run alot slower on the Mac. Unlike last year's where you could skip the "Easy Step" and go straight to the forms to directly input your transactions, now you are forced to either use the excruciatingly slow "Easy Step" or use the so-called Capital Gains "Speed Entry" Worksheet. And if you've had hundreds of transactions, "Easy Step" would require you to spend a few days to input all of them. And if you decide to use the Speed Entry Worksheet, you'd have to input each transaction in its entirety, not just the cost basis that your financial institution forgets to send you. Note that this CD comes with both the Mac and PC version. I tried them both and it seems the PC version is a little faster when it comes to editing stock transactions. Since the deadline's just a few days away, I'll just suck it up and use TurboTax's "Easy Step" to edit all of my transactions. Too bad I can't just used TurboTax 2006 for 2007's tax return.
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