Vertex vs TurboTax Business: Which is a better fit?

Tigran: Hi, my name is Tigran. I'm a small business owner. I run two businesses, one in real estate and another one is in financial analytical consulting. So basically the first business deals with buying, selling, renovating, renting out homes, and the second business is all about calculations, analytical calculations in numerics. I would like to give TurboTax Business a rating of five. So before I switched to TurboTax, I actually filled out all the forms myself by hand. And when the amount of paperwork became too much, I hired a CPA. And this didn't really work for me because I didn't really know what was going on behind the scenes and also, I was afraid that there could be a mistake. Either I can make a mistake when calculating everything by hand or my CPA would make a mistake, which she actually did. And also with time when my business was growing, the amount of information that I had to put into the tax returns was too much. And actually my CPA fees were running a lot. And especially when you have many rentals, you will be looking at pretty serious bills. So for TurboTax, I actually did not have any serious limitations on the number of rentals, as I know they have certain figure, but it's pretty high. So if you have 1, 2, 3, 10 rentals or slightly more, it's still the same price. And on top of that, what I like about TurboTax is that I can actually play with numbers a little bit to figure out my strategy for the next year. So the reason I picked TurboTax was because this is probably one of the best known packages on the market, and the price looked all right. It was actually cheaper than using a CPA, so I decided to give it a try and I really, really loved it. So I was really hooked and I never switched to anything else. So starting with TurboTax was pretty easy actually and there are lots of hints and a lot of information online, and it even feels like a game in a sense. So it's kind of a little bit addictive because it suggests you certain deductions and certain tricks. So it was pretty easy to start. Sometimes I had to really dig deeper into the law because some nuances are pretty subtle. And even within the package, it was not clarified enough. But after a certain time, you can get familiar with the packet, you can kind of sense what you need to use as an input. And with every year, it actually took me less and less time to prepare my returns for me and my company. My main recommendation would be to actually study the law. You don't have to go through the entire tax code. You can buy some books and go through them page by page to figure out the best solution for your business because TurboTax is not a magic stick. It's a tool. So you really need to know in advance how to structure your business, how to run it properly in order to minimize your taxes. And once you know the law, once you know all these strategies, then you can actually use TurboTax properly. It will not tell you everything when you're filing the taxes, it will only hint at things that you need to put down in your tax returns.