We did not deliver the best tax season we could have," Smith said in this week's third-quarter earnings webcast. And when it came to sales of the consumer TurboTax software, "Units were up against last year, but less than anticipated," he said. Smith said the company had planned on growing the number of digital filers by 6 percent, but only achieved a five-percent increase.

For the most recently ended quarter, net income was $734 million, an increase of 6.7 percent from $688 million in last year's corresponding period. Revenue for the third quarter was $1.95 billion, up 5.4 percent from $1.85 billion a year earlier. The company increased its budget for promoting TurboTax and overall spent about 7 percent more on marketing. But Smith told participants, "I am not pleased in the return on that investment."

On the professional side, Intuit sold 107,000 units of ProSeries and Lacerte, up from 104,000 for the 2011 tax season although it's still not up to the peak of 108,000 units in 2009. Smith had little to say about the professional side, but a lot to say about TurboTax.

Among program that Intuit launched during the recent tax season was its "Ask a Tax Pro" program in which CPAs and enrolled agents provided advice to consumers. And while Smith said the company liked its ask a professional program, it thought it should have done better. "We didn't bring out as many as we thought we would. We had set an aggressive goal for ourselves," he said. The company also pulled more customers away from the tax stores, but did not do as well as it had planned. And in the online channel, it had anticipated taking another point of market share, its share was flat.

One area that had a big impact was GoPayment. Smith said payments services and products were responsible for half of the new business added.