TurboTax Premier 2010 Investments Gotcha
@ March 31, 2011, 11 p.m.
Filed under: Personal Frustration
I've been trying to get my federal taxes done this past week and hit a snag. This is the first year I needed to do stock related stuff and figured TurboTax would import the data from my financial institution and all would be well but in reality I ended up hitting a bug that confused me for days.
First off, I don't have any weird investments. When I imported the data I noticed that the investments summary numbers were close but didn't fully match the paper work my financial institution sent. It didn't take me long to figure out what the issue was, but getting that change to show up in TurboTax took days. It was related to a wash sale. As it turned out TurboTax was given the right data but didn't actually utilize the fact that one was a wash until I did a work around. Since this may help someone else out there needing to do the same thing let me explain what I did (it may work for you, or it may cause more issues -- be careful -- this is not and should not be taken as tax advise!):
1. Import data from the financial institution
2. Made sure to hit done and finish imports
3. Clicked 'Wages & Income' near the top
4. Clicked 'update' next to 'Stocks, Mutual Funds....'
5. Clicked 'edit' on the first line item that was imported
6. Clicked 'done' or 'save' or whatever the bottom right good-to-go button was
.... and there you go! You got to the part that will ask you questions so you can enter a wash sale. If I didn't follow that pattern it would not utilize the wash information that was imported. Now comes the second bug which continued my trend of confusion. If you start answering the questions it will continue asking you the same questions over, and over, and over, and over again. As it turns out it's because "Importing Transactions May Cause Looping When Entering Wash Sales". In essence you end up answering the question and when it tries to repeat you click the blue 'back' button on the form, click the blue 'continue' button on the previous form and then it will actually save it.
digg it
seed it
del.icio.us
ma.gnolia
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Filed under: Personal Frustration
I've been trying to get my federal taxes done this past week and hit a snag. This is the first year I needed to do stock related stuff and figured TurboTax would import the data from my financial institution and all would be well but in reality I ended up hitting a bug that confused me for days.
First off, I don't have any weird investments. When I imported the data I noticed that the investments summary numbers were close but didn't fully match the paper work my financial institution sent. It didn't take me long to figure out what the issue was, but getting that change to show up in TurboTax took days. It was related to a wash sale. As it turned out TurboTax was given the right data but didn't actually utilize the fact that one was a wash until I did a work around. Since this may help someone else out there needing to do the same thing let me explain what I did (it may work for you, or it may cause more issues -- be careful -- this is not and should not be taken as tax advise!):
1. Import data from the financial institution
2. Made sure to hit done and finish imports
3. Clicked 'Wages & Income' near the top
4. Clicked 'update' next to 'Stocks, Mutual Funds....'
5. Clicked 'edit' on the first line item that was imported
6. Clicked 'done' or 'save' or whatever the bottom right good-to-go button was
.... and there you go! You got to the part that will ask you questions so you can enter a wash sale. If I didn't follow that pattern it would not utilize the wash information that was imported. Now comes the second bug which continued my trend of confusion. If you start answering the questions it will continue asking you the same questions over, and over, and over, and over again. As it turns out it's because "Importing Transactions May Cause Looping When Entering Wash Sales". In essence you end up answering the question and when it tries to repeat you click the blue 'back' button on the form, click the blue 'continue' button on the previous form and then it will actually save it.
digg it
seed it
del.icio.us
ma.gnolia
Log in to post comments.
