So, I bit the bullet. I was about to complete the time-honoured tradition of filing my taxes using a pen, paper and computer spreadsheet, when out of exhaustion I used some of those nifty online tax things to fill out mine.
I did complete the forms in the spreadsheet, both Federal and Provincial, until I became too tired to review my own numbers and spreadsheet formulas. It seemed like I messed up some of the cells when I attempted to add a non-integer cell number, and I couldn't be bothered to double-check all the cells. So, out of curiousity, I filled out forms on the yet-unamed online service as a way of validating my own numbers. The service was free until the forms were submitted anyway to the revenue agencies, so what's to lose?
I made a few mistakes in my own spreadsheets. Worth a lot of money. I was able to re-balance my spreadsheets to match the online service's, but by that time paying the inexpensive fee to submit everything electronically and to avoid going to the post office last weekend, I just payed the license with my credit card, and off it went.
Well, not exactly. For Québec's, it can use a yearly code that lets the tax software send the tax forms directly to the government, so that was automated, while for Canada's you have to manually send a file in some web form. And while Québec's way is more convenient to the user, I wonder if that creates a more closed system where it would be impossible for open-source or independant developers to send tax forms to the government, including myself. I won't enter that bureaucratic mess just to figure out that answer.
Was the online service I used easy to use? Well, it was fine. I won't be making a recommendiation until I try out other alternatives, but suffice to say that for most people the popular ones ought to be valid, at least in terms of computation. Because, in the end, taxes in Québec are complex, and your difficulty in understanding and applying tax laws to your finances will be far greater than using even the most disorganized tax software. Even more, it seems like finance is where usability has the lowest acceptance bar, as if finance in general became unintuitive on purpose.
Published on April 8, 2013 at 22:18 EDT
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