April brings spring and tax season. In years past I’ve simply purchased Quicktax for income tax preparation, but my recent problems with Intuit software activation, and a desire to find a solution that runs on Linux led me to look for alternatives. I looked at QuickTaxWeb / Taxwiz Online, but it didn’t support either Firefox or Linux.

uFile.ca supports Firefox 1.x, and worked well. It noted that I didn’t have Acrobat reader installed, but considered that an optional requirement. The return looked fine in Gnome’s PDF viewer, but I haven’t tested printing from it vs. Acrobat to see if the output is identical yet. I may not have to; Adobe has announced Acrobat 7.0 for Linux will be available later today.

Intuit makes some great software - I’ve used Quicken for years - but their activation system is annoying. When I installed Linux on my primary workstation, I transferred the contents of my Windows installation to a smaller hard disk for installation in another machine. Quicken can be installed on two computers, so it was reactivated, but WillExpert stopped working, claiming I’d already installed it on another computer. The problem was solved relatively easily with a phone call to their support centre, but I discovered the problem on Good Friday when the office was to be closed for the next few days. The time we’d set aside to update the wills was lost as a result.

I’ll be avoiding Intuit products in future, which will be easy enough - they don’t run on Linux anyhow.