I've been using Deluxe and Basic editions of Turbo Tax for 6 years, to prepare my personal tax returns. Now that I have my own S-Corp, I looked to Turbo Tax Business to save me the expense of an accountant. It got the job done, but leaves a lot to be desired.
1) No Macintosh edition. It's 2011, not 2001. Many small business owners use Macs to run their business. Get with the times. It was very inconvenient to borrow a Windows machine just to run this software, and constantly have to refer to the business records on my Mac laptop.
2) The New York State S-Corp return software was not available for download until March 4th, only 11 days before the filing due date.
3) The product description says you can use this software to create 1099-MISC forms for your contractors. Very misleading. In truth, you do this on a separate Intuit website that is free to the public. It was very hard to find this. I had to dig through the help files on the Intuit website. The software itself seems to only understand 1099-MISC as something you enter, not something you create.
4) As a NYC business owner, I have to file Federal, State, and City taxes. I had to pay $50 to download NYC, and another $50 to download NYS. I was very dissatisfied with the NYC program. The software referred to both returns as 'New York', and filed them both in the 'State' section of the program, so it took some careful reading to decide which one I was in at any given moment. The actual filing procedure is a mess, so this created an additional headache.
On one page, it says the NYC return CANNOT be filed electronically. On the following page, it says 'the taxing agency REQUIRES that it be e-filed.' At $50 a pop, I shouldn't have to be researching the correct answer on the web myself. While the form itself makes it look like you could file it in the mail, the nyc.gov Business Tax eFile page states that it must be filed electronically. The Turbo Tax software acted like it could do this, but I wasn't convinced since it never took me through a step to enter the bank ETF info necessary to pay the amount owed. I filed the NYC4SEZ on the city website instead, using the Turbo Tax prepared form as a reference. I paid an extra $50 for this?
Accountant's fees are expensive, so I will probably use this product again next year, for lack of a better option.