A Quick QuickTax Online Review

I got my first real job when I was in Grade 12. I worked for about four months, at slightly above minimum wage, so I didn’t exactly make a ton of money. Over the next four years I went to college, so I had jobs over the summer but I never made enough money to pay a lot of taxes. In fact, most of my paychecks didn’t even deduct tax because I knew, and the government knew, that I would just get it all back anyways.

Of course that all changed when I graduated from college and started making real money. 2009 was the first year where I worked for a full 12 months. It was also the year that I got married. It was also the year I started writing about personal finance, so I figured that if I ever was going to do my own taxes, it was now. After reading some of Tom’s reports on possible free online versions of tax software, I bookmarked a couple and decided to try them out. One afternoon I navigated over to QuickTax Online, where I perused the “requirements” for the free version.

*note* There are free and not free versions of QuickTax Online. Here is a link to the free ones, and here is the link to the not free ones.

You qualify for the QuickTax Free Online Edition if…

* You receive T-slips such as T4s and T4As
* You have tip income or pension income to claim
* You are not self-employed
* You do not have investment income
* You only receive standardized federal & provincial deductions

Well, as far as I knew, I qualified. The only deductions I was planning on making were from transit passes, student loan interest payments, and carry forward from college tuition. I was a little hesitant because I was going to be filing as a married couple – something that I knew I probably should do, but wasn’t sure about the rules/regulations that were associated with doing so.

Using QuickTax Online

After creating an account, QuickTax will walk you through your personal profile. It will ask you questions about you, your spouse, your work, and your income. How you answer these questions will determine which parts of the QuickTax program you will go through. For example, if you have retirement income, then they will ask you about it, but if you don’t have any, then they won’t. It was good because it answered all my questions/fears to do with filing as a married couple all within the first few minutes.

After you create your profile, the online software will take you through each relevant area of your finances. It will ask you about your income, which is where you will copy the information from your T4 and related documents, it will ask you about your RRSPs, if you have any, your deductions, any relevant provincial tax questions that are specific to the area in which you live, and will finally review your entire tax application with you to ensure that everything makes sense to them and to you.

I found that using QuickTax Online was very easy. All the questions were fairly straightforward, and almost anything I didn’t understand had a link to a definition or instruction to help further explain. In fact, it was so easy, it was almost frustrating. Because of your profile, it simply skips over entire sections. Sections that I wasn’t sure whether or not I needed to fill out. I could see that they existed, but the program wouldn’t bring me to them, because it knew that I didn’t need them. It was very smart software, it just never explained to me why it was being so smart.

The program was so smart that it even predicted what I needed without me prompting it. I had finished the deductions section, but there was no place for me to insert my transit pass deductions. So I figured I would continue through the review and if I never found where I could place them, I would take my tax return elsewhere. However, out of nowhere, a popup box told me that I might qualify for a special deduction on transit passes, as it “applied to me”. I never said I had transit passes to deduct, I wasn’t even in the deduction section anymore. It just knew. So I filled out that information and moved on. I still can’t find where I can alter that information if necessary, but it is in there somewhere.

Sadly, I have two complaints. The first is that every so often QuickTax would try to up-sell me to a paid version, or addition, to their tax preparation software. This would be in the form of pages that would look identical to the actual forms I was filling out, so I was forced to carefully read the entire paragraph of an advertisement before realizing that it was simply asking me to give them $5 here, or $10 there, for peace of mind monitoring or a live helpful call agent. To get past it you simply have to click “no thanks” but it was still intrusive. Especially since “free” wasn’t so free for me.

While I thought I met all the requirements, somewhere along the way QuickTax helpfully informed me that I do not actually meet those specifications, and must pay for my returns. I’m not sure if it was because I was filing jointly as married, if it was the student loan carry over or interest deductions, or what, but I ended up paying about $15/return, for a total of about $33 including tax. Oh, and they waited to tell me this when I was nearly done filing the return, so I felt like if I walked away now I’d be losing a lot of time and effort by not filing through them. So not overly expensive, but certainly more than I was hoping for.

All in all, QuickTax Online seems to be a good program for those that have simple returns (like mine) without complicated (or any) deductions. It is a good way to do it yourself. So if you have a couple of hours and all the necessary documents, and you feel like it is worth the time, effort, and potential cost, then QuickTax Online is a viable way of filing taxes on your own – even if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Related Posts:

• Tax Software Review – QuickTax 2009
• TurboTax 2010 Online Review
• Tax Software Review – UFile