Jackson Hewitt is best known for in-person tax preparation, and the company still has roughly 6,000 brick-and-mortar locations in the US, 3,000 of them located in Walmart stores. Having entered the online tax preparation software market several years ago, it is capable of preparing and filing both simple and complex returns. That said, the company’s in-person expertise hasn’t translated well enough to justify its service’s use for DIY filers in recent years. Confusing navigation tools and substandard help so far remain our biggest complaints in our early preview of the service’s 2021 offering (which you’d use to file you 2020 taxes).
Major Pricing, Version Changes
Jackson Hewitt used to offer three different versions of its online DIY tax preparation solutions at varying prices. Now there’s just one, priced reasonably at $49 for federal and unlimited state returns (other companies charge a fee for each state filed). Federal only, with no state returns is $25. This year’s version supports all major IRS forms and schedules, so you should be able to complete complex returns. Of course, this lineup change means that there’s no longer a free version, so if your financial situation is very simple, you’d be better off exploring one of the free versions available from other vendors.
For comparison, H&R Block Deluxe has a suggested retail price of $49.99 (a $29.99 promotional price is in force at this writing), with state returns adding $36.99 each. TurboTax starts at $60 for Deluxe (currently $40) and adds $50 per state (temporarily $40). TaxSlayer starts at $17 for the Classic plan plus $32 per state. TaxAct Deluxe’s price has been reduced a bit this year. It’s $24.95 for federal and $44.95 per state.
One free option is Credit Karma Tax, which costs nothing for federal and state filing. Another is FreeTaxUSA, which is free for federal returns and $12.95 per state. However, you sacrifice quite a bit with those services (especially Credit Karma Tax) when it comes to handholding, which can be essential during the tax preparation process.
Jackson Hewitt offers another way to prepare and file your taxes: Tax Pro From Home. Like you would if you were using a similar service from TurboTax or H&R Block, you answer a few questions about your tax situation and get an upfront quote. You’re then matched with a Tax Pro. You upload your tax documents to a secure online account and answer any questions via chat or phone. Video conferencing is expected to be available in February. When you return is done, you review and sign it, and your Tax Pro files it for you. Prices at this writing range from $69-249 (may change later in the tax season).
Similar Attributes
Personal tax preparation websites function similarly, though they vary greatly in terms of support and user experience. They’re much easier to use than the old method (pencil, paper, and calculator) that forces you to switch back and forth between the 1040 and its related forms, schedules, and instructions.
Tax sites remove this burden from the process. In general, they’re proactive and conversational. Step-by-step wizards ask you questions and provide easy ways for you to supply answers. If you aren’t sure what a particular query or statement means, you can consult a variety of built-in help resources. Most provide a way for you to chat, call, or send an email to one of the company’s dedicated support professionals. You never have to see an official IRS form or instruction (though that’s sometimes an option), and the guidance is often written in easy-to-understand terms.
As you respond to the site’s questions, the website prepares your actual return in the background. These websites—even the totally free Credit Karma Tax—do all required calculations and drop your answers onto the correct lines of the correct IRS documents. When you think you have entered every detail that pertains to your tax-related financial life, they go back to the beginning and quickly review everything, alerting you to problems or omissions. If you need to file a state return, the service transfers over pertinent data and helps you prepare that, too.
Early Steps
If you’ve never used Jackson Hewitt before, you first need to create an account. You enter a unique username and password, select and answer security questions, and verify your identity by text or email. The site then asks you a series of questions about topics such as your name and address, filing status, and Social Security number. If you used Jackson Hewitt last year, the site should carry that information over once you’ve entered your username and password from last year. It will also present a list of forms you completed for the 2019 tax year and ask if you want them included. You’ll still be asked to verify the information it brought in, of course.
Once you’ve completed those introductory screens, the site asks about W-2s and other sources of income. It then goes on to cover dependents, deductions and credits, health care, and other tax situations.
Getting Around
There are two ways to move through the site. If you are an experienced tax filer or have a simple return, you can select the topics you want to visit. In the Income section, this includes items like W-2s and interest income. You select one from the main list, go through its questions, and return to the list for more. If you have a complex return, are fairly new to tax preparation, or just want to make sure you don’t miss anything, you can use the sequential interview option. This wizard-driven option takes you all the way through the 1040 and supporting documents, asking questions about every topic covered by the service.
You’ll respond to the interview’s questions and statements in a variety of ways, primarily by entering data in fields and clicking buttons. Jackson Hewitt does an acceptable job of describing what it’s looking for, but some sites, like TurboTax Deluxe, provide lengthier, more detailed explanations. The site sometimes asks multiple questions for an uncomplicated topic, then gives short shrift to other topics that rival sites explore more thoroughly. For example, it devotes one field to the total for your medical and dental expenses, and it doesn’t even ask you to name the charitable organizations you supported with cash.
Jackson Hewitt does have an innovative way of moving you quickly through sections where multiple, simple questions are posed one screen at a time. Take the interest income section: Instead of forcing you to keep clicking Next after you’ve answered a question with Yes or No, your Yes or No response moves you onto the next question quickly using an upward sliding motion, kind of like a slot machine spinning. This time-saving convention is preferable to H&R Block Deluxe’s practice of requiring you to click twice on a screen when only one question is asked. When multiple fields appear on the same screen, you click Next or Back to advance or go backward when you’re done.
When you complete fields whose numbers are the total of smaller numbers, you can better document your taxes by using the site’s helpful background bookkeeping feature like the one in TaxAct. As you record details about your business, for example, you come across a lengthy list of expense types. You can’t enter a total directly in the field here. Instead, you click Add to open a small window that contains fields for Description and Amount. Under Advertising, you might have a subtotal for Facebook ads and another for business cards. You can keep adding rows until you’re done, and the total transfers to the main field. This is good for bookkeeping purposes but adds a step when you just want to enter a total.
Nonstandard Navigation
Jackson Hewitt’s navigation has some irregularities. When you log back into the site after being gone, for example, the site doesn’t ask whether you want to return to the last page visited like TaxSlayer and others do. In my testing, it took me to the very end of the interview and told me I hadn’t filed yet. I had to use the navigation pane, which only gave me the option to go back to the very beginning of the federal return since I hadn’t finished that yet. I had been working on Income, so at least I was able to start at the beginning of the Business section. Making you page through everything again is an unnecessary additional stress in a process that is already stressful enough for most people.
If you get partway through a lengthy section and you have to stop, there’s often a link that says, “Save my progress…I’ll finish this form later.” But there’s no comprehensive navigation outline that would allow you to get back to that form quickly when you return. I had to click through numerous screens that I’d already completed to get there. If you click Cancel without saving, a small window opens, warning you to save before you leave. Jackson Hewitt is the only site I’ve tested that requires occasional manual saving, which gives it a dated feel. Autosaving is a more convenient solution and makes it less likely you’ll lose work, too.
Overall, I spent too much time backtracking and was unable to see a comprehensive view of everything I’d done—something that’s standard on many tax sites, even including FreeTaxUSA.
The site’s graphics, fonts, layout, and overall design are uninspiring. Jackson Hewitt falls well short of sites such as TurboTax and H&R Block. Its user interface simply isn’t very compelling, which is a problem for an application that requires a significant (and stressful) time commitment. You’ll do a lot of your work in the upper-left corner, which is where single questions appear frequently, with a yawning expanse of the screen left blank. TurboTax and H&R Block show that an attractive design makes an appreciable difference in the process.
Help Wanted
The user experience is important, but the quality, accessibility, and depth of a tax site’s help resources are more critical. Websites that excel at this, like TurboTax, provide instant help for most topics—certainly the most complicated ones. They hyperlink terms and open small windows with clearly written, understandable explanations, or they anticipate issues and make brief Q&As available on the same screen as the questions.
Jackson Hewitt falls short here, too. The quality and quantity of help don’t compare favorably with competitors. The only context-sensitive help on the data-gathering pages is an occasional hyperlinked question or statement. For example, when filling out a page of business expenses, one hyperlinked phrase reads, “What items should I depreciate?” Clicking on the link opens a small window with a very brief explanation. It also says that depreciation will be covered later in the interview. I was especially dismayed that there wasn’t adequate help provided for the Qualified Business Income (QBI) deduction, a fairly new and complex deduction.
When I clicked the Help link, I could either enter a search word or phrase, or I could chat with the support staff or send an email. The hits that came back from my searches were primarily links to related forms. Occasional FAQs that appeared often weren’t relevant. Once I’d finished on that screen, there was no way to easily return to the topic I had been working on since it doesn’t open in a separate window like it does in FreeTaxUSA. I had to find my way back through the main navigation pane.
Error-Checking
Jackson Hewitt does stop you on screens where you haven’t supplied required information. When I tried to enter mortgage interest without providing a lender address, for example, the Next button remained grayed out, so I couldn’t proceed. My only options were to either go back or cancel. When I canceled, I was allowed to proceed and work on later sections of the site, something some competitors won’t allow. Some competitors do allow you to proceed, though, creating a bookmark for pages with missing information so you remember to go back and complete them.
Jackson Hewitt’s final review is good. It caught errors created because I saved some sections without completing them. For example, when I left off some information about a dependent (including Social Security number), clicking on that error took me to the beginning of that section (not the precise screen). Once I completed it and clicked Save, it returned me to the main review page. I was also able to review forms I’d completed and add more, as well as search for others I might have missed. It’d be great to have access to this directory of forms and topics much earlier in the process.
Sensible Security
Jackson Hewitt employs a layered defense strategy, like its competitors do. Multi-factor authentication is supported, for example, and all data you transmit from your computer or phone is encrypted. In addition, you’re notified about any account activity, like a password reset or efile submission.
The Mobile Experience
Jackson Hewitt uses responsive design to provide a mobile-friendly version of its online tax service rather than a separate app for filing your taxes on a mobile device. That is, you can easily access it by entering the site address in your smartphone’s browser. I tested the process of filing taxes on a mobile device via both iOS and Android.
The company does a good job of replicating the tax preparation experience for the small screen. It offers two data-entry options: You can either select the topics you need to complete or use the step-by-step walk-through. The user interface is fine, though not at all innovative, and the site does thoroughly explore the content it supports. I actually enjoyed using the mobile version more than the desktop because the limited screen area got rid of all the white space.
Looking at the site on a mobile device didn’t solve any of the problems I found in the desktop version, though. For example, there’s no comprehensive navigation outline. The navigation tool that slides out when you click a link in the upper-left corner divides the site into very broad areas, like Federal and State, with few subtopics. So, you’ll be clicking the Back and Next buttons a lot. The site doesn’t automatically save when you advance to the next screen; sometimes you have to do this manually. There’s no mobile context-sensitive help, and searching for words or phrases often returns only a list of forms, not explanatory text.
There Are Better Options
Jackson Hewitt is a big name in the world of tax preparation, but its DIY online service doesn’t provide any compelling reasons to recommend it. The user experience needs improvement and navigating the site can be problematic in places. And the built-in help tools don’t even measure up to those of lower-cost or free products. Note that this is a preview of the service; we’ll update it to a fully scored review when we’ve had a chance to take a look at the final code of Jackson Hewitt and all its competitors.
If you used it last year and liked it, there’s no reason to change, though—unless you want a better user experience and a far more active help system such as those offered by TurboTax. Granted, you’d have to spring for TurboTax Self-Employed to get all the form and schedule support offered by Jackson Hewitt Online. But once you start dealing with tax issues like investments and self-employment, you’re probably going to need more help than Jackson Hewitt offers. TurboTax provides that help—multiple types on every screen that’s thorough and understandable. Its user experience is unparalleled in the universe of personal tax preparation websites, and its depth instills confidence that you’ve explored and dealt with all relevant tax issues.
Once you finish taking care of last year’s finances, you should also consider the future. For your own money, you can read our story about the best personal finance software, and if you run a small business, we have a roundup of the best accounting software.
