All tax preparation websites work similarly, though their user experiences and guidance resources vary greatly. Jackson Hewitt interviews you like a human preparer, asking questions about your income and expenses from the previous tax year. It does this with a wizard-like tool. You can progress through the site using this approach or just select the tax topics from lists to create your own path.
You answer the questions on each page by clicking buttons, entering data, or selecting from lists. You never see official IRS forms and schedules (unless you want to), which is ideal. On some pages, such as mortgage interest, the site shows only the most commonly used fields and provides a link to advanced options if needed.
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Jackson Hewitt works in the background, doing all the required calculations and depositing your answers on IRS documents. Some help is available along the way. When you complete all the relevant tax situations (also called tax topics), the site reviews your answers and points out possible errors and omissions. The last step is to pay for the service, as it helps you print or e-file your return.
To use Jackson Hewitt, you must first create an account and set up your security options. Then the site launches into its lengthy Q&A, asking for personal details such as your family members’ dates of birth and Social Security numbers, as well as your filing status. If you used Jackson Hewitt for your 2024 taxes, the site can import that information, and it brings in more data than competitors. Every other online tax prep site, except for Jackson Hewitt and Liberty Tax, lets you import data from a competitor.
Once you lay the groundwork for your tax return, you can move on to income, deduction, and credit topics using a combination of lists and Q&A walk-throughs.
Competing tax prep services help taxpayers by making navigation extremely intuitive. Jackson Hewitt handles your returns’ overall flow just fine, but it has some navigation quirks that can cost you time and create frustration. Every time you log in, for example, it takes you right back to the beginning instead of asking if you want to start where you left off. The site also doesn’t autosave every page like most competitors (Liberty Tax is another offender here).
