Took yesterday to make sure I had all of the information I was going to need. I am going to do this for each program, once with the TXF file that Quicken creates to import and once without, only using native capability within the software and hand entering the rest.
It has only been 2 full days since I installed TurboTax and it still had to do an update.Two minutes. Usually I would blame the government for not having all forms done when they should, however, when I got the details, it appears that it was all Intuits issue "We are currently experiencing an issue in TurboTax Desktop 2015 for
Windows. When customers click on "More Details" in the TurboTax updater,
they are directed to the Answer Xchange main page. Resolution: An update to TurboTax Desktop 2015 for Windows will be released in
Mid-February fixing the "More Details" link in the TurboTax Updater.
This update will be available by February 19th, 2016." Well, at least they got it out a couple of days early. This (and the fore mentioned government delays) is why I rarely file earlier than April. It is worth it to note that the program checked for this update when it launched and was not adversely affected by having the "IntuitUpdater" service on manual mode and not running.
Opened the previous file that was created when I installed the program and imported last year's filed data. Saved a copy I will work from. TurboTax will import 3 kinds of files, previous year's returns, Accounting software (i.e. Quicken), Financial Institution data from online and donation data from It's Deductible Online, which you have to log on to access. I did not use IDO, so I started with the Institutional to be followed by Accounting, since not all of the places I bank/invest with do the Web connect thing with Intuit. They list over 250 institutions, however, only E*Trade, and USAA imported. Although I had tax documents from Everbank, nothing imported. If your earnings are less than $10 in one of the accounts for the year, don't expect them to provide any information (i.e. Everbank checking, Pentagon Federal) - you'll have to glean that info from your year end statement, should you choose to.
With everything imported "from the source" that I could, I then went to Accounting Software. The choices are for "Other Financial Software (TXF file)," "Quickbooks (2010-2016)," Quicken(2016, 2015, 2014)," and "Quicken Rental Property Manager (TXF file)." Notice that even though versions of Quicken prior to 2014 still work as accounting software, you would have to update to one of those versions to use it natively in TT. That effectively forces you to "upgrade" every 3 years. However, there may be a work around, since Quicken also exports TXF files (which I will have to use in HRB). I closed my Quicken 2014 to make sure there were no file conflicts and chose that option.
Turns out I did not need to close Quicken as TT launched it to get the information. It then presents a list of all the items that either Quicken or I identified as applying to taxes, so I could eliminate those that weren't really applicable or had already been loaded above
Even with import, there is still a lot of work to be done by hand. There were sales of stock that did not have cost basis reported, which is kind of critical, since the number TT had would have registered as pure profit and all been taxable. So there was a lot of manual entry required and I had to decide if I was going to use E*Trades import or Quicken's import. Since the download from E*Trade was what was supposedly provided to the IRS, I chose that one and hand entered all of the basis information. So much for saving me effort, fortunately Quicken has a Capital Gains report custom designed that I could print.
Since TT did not need to use the TXF file, but I still had to enter a lot of information to make it complete, I have decided to change my original concept to just going through this once (at least with TT). I did verify that my Captial Loss Carry over, and IRA basis information did import from last years file. The biggest issue I came across unfortunately is due to E*Trade as several of last year's transactions were reported as "Wash Sales" and I never trade at less than 31 days interval They are interspersed throughout the 1099-B, so I will have to go back and look at each entry and try to figure out why it was reported that way.
No comments:
Post a Comment