NEXT; NOW THAT THE SCENE IS SET, WE HAVE MY SEDUCTION BY CCH COMPUTAX
I have over the last few years have been receiving more unearned income which means that I have allowed my client work to decrease. Since the number of my clients has decreased, I want my client costs to also decrease. Thus for my 2020 contract, I agreed to certain base costs (one of them for TaxNotebook/Organizer, which I will discuss later), and the unlimited number of California individual returns. Thus I would pay $60 for each federal individual return.
Now I knew that each year, PFX Computax would offer customers the opportunity to purchase extra authorizations to use the following year. I, previously, was not interested in this, because I was purchasing unlimited federal and California individual returns, and any other returns I would be happy to pay on an as-I -go basis. This year I was. Indeed. the invitation to purchase the additional authorizations was very inviting. If you want to see the invitation, click on this to to to the page that has a copy of it. However, I was in so much of a rush that I did not realize I was obtaining the 2020 authorizations on a Windows 7 computer, which I could not use for 2020 returns because PFX Computax for 2020 will only run an a Windows 10 Professional.
Now if the procedures for obtaining and returning authorizations which had been in effect for 25 years ending just a few weeks before this, I would not have had a problem. I would have simply reversed the authorizations made on the Windows 7 Professional computer and then made them on the Windows 10 Professional Computer that I was planning and indeed have used for 2020. No amount of fiddling would enable me to get advantage of those authorizations on my Windows 7 computer.
CCH Computax says that I owe them $3,642.00 for those errant authorizations:
By the way, of the above the amounts, the last was paid on April 25, the day it was due, and the second from the top, $124.25 was paid by check, which they apparently cannot handle. The credits were created in the PFX Computax accounting department and have nothing to do with me,
I will tell you about the third aspect of my problems with PFX Computax, namely their elimination of the Tax Notebook feature, and my not finding out about until January 2020, on a separate page.
Having taken the trouble to do this, I have decided that will very probably not renew with PFX computax but will go back to Lacerte, or part of the Lacerte family, which I used back in the early 1990's.