Do$h Tax review

Dosh reckons this is 'simply making tax less taxing', but after an hour of ticking and filling on-screen boxes, we were hankering for the trusty printed form.

That's because Dosh Tax replicates the form down to the smallest detail, and it doesn't work nearly as well on screen as it does on the page. It also negates the whole point of this kind of software. Most of us would buy it because the form confuses or scares us. The blurb on the box, which wisely steers clear of showing the rough, unattractive interface, says all you need to do is enter your personal incomings, outgoings, assets, capital gains 'and any other details'. What it omits is the qualifying sentence '...in a form identical to the one you got free through the post'.

At least it includes all the supplementary pages - self-employment, partnership, trusts and so on - but inside a poky window that, when you expand it, does nothing to enlarge the form. As such, we kept our printed form handy so we could read what each box meant. We also kept the set of guidance notes that arrived with it on 6 April, as Dosh Tax does little to explain what each box means. Neither does it go to much effort when it comes to explaining the logic behind some of its actions. Automatically adding £3 tax credit to a share dividend of £24.75 is correct, but it didn't explain why it wasn't £3.06, as stated on the tax voucher that accompanied the dividend cheque. The explanation, of course, is that Inland Revenue can't be doing with pennies, and prefers that you round to the nearest pound.

The program has a tendency to throw up imaginary errors. Certain boxes, of course, have to be filled in. We're talking name, tax reference and so on here. Tabbing through the form - even if it's into one of these boxes so you can fill it in when one of these details hasn't yet been entered - brings up an unfriendly reminder that you've missed out (or more accurately not yet got to) some information crucial to properly filing your return. As such, your first few minutes will be spent repeatedly clicking the OK button to clear the error. This is more pronounced in the self-employment pages, as it throws up reminders that you need to fill in box 3.74 when you're still 60 boxes behind on entry 3.16. Unless you want to clear the dialog every time, you'd do best to skip ahead to fill in that answer, then come back.

There's little in the way of simple intelligence here. Ticking the box that says you need pages for employment and self-employment doesn't add them to your return: you must do that manually. The box ticking is purely aesthetic, so that they'll appear as ticked boxes in a printed or electronically filed form.

As such, we found ourselves wondering why we'd spend money on something that so closely mimics what the Inland Revenue had already sent us. We recommend you save yourself the cost of the software and make the effort to get your return in by the end of September so that someone else can do the calculations for you.