Tips On Importing Stock Transactions To Intuit Tax Online

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Beginning in tax year 2013, Intuit Tax Online finally was equipped with some limited import capability thru excel file or .csv file to improve data input efficiency.  As mentioned in my previous post, importing stock transactions in this manner is not straight forward, it requires us to scrub the spread sheet to comply with the software's import format.  One issue that the software's import instruction doesn't mention is that there should be no special character in the "Description" column on your spread sheet before import, because the software  doesn't take special character such as ",  or #".  Remember to scrub out all special characters before importing, or you will be flashed by the software  with error message about "missing required description column".  Once your spread sheet is successfully imported, you have to check the "Ignore" box next to the heading line imported from your spreadsheet, and then select in the above drop down boxes (see picture above) the appropriate headings. Only columns that are selected through the drop down box are imported.  So make sure you select all the headings that are relevant to your columns in your spread sheet to ensure a complete schedule D import.

Intuit Tax Online 2013 Finally Allows Import Of Excel File Or CSV File

I finally got my day trading client's years of past due tax returns caught up.  In my last post, I had mentioned about my dissatisfaction with Intuit Tax Online's lack of capability of importing 1099s. After manually typing in hundreds and hundreds of lines of stock trades from several years back, I have to say that it's not fun at all, even for a fast typist like myself.  I ended up billing my client a lot more for my extra typing.  Thank God that beginning in  tax year 2013, the software finally allows Excel file or .CSV file import.  It's still not as efficient because it depends on whether the brokerage provides the trade records in excel or .csv format.  One of my client's brokerages is Fidelity which unfortunately claimed that trade activities weren't available in any type of spread sheet format other than Pdf.  I have no idea if the customer service reps there were telling me the truth or they were just plain stupid,  because it's hard to believe any data that is stored in the computer to generate any statement in Pdf  without being able to generate the trade records in spread sheet format.  After calling Fidelity back and forth and being bounced from one customer service rep to another, while being put on hold with annoying music forever, I just gave up.

This is what I have been putting up with for many years since I started working.  It always amazes me that how the USA is the superpower of the world when there is so much inefficiencies everywhere, whether it's with the Big 4 accounting firms, or with Wall Street, or with the healthcare industry.  Anyway, I finally decided to just convert my client's thick pile of pdf 1099s into excel, using the Adobe converter, which is about $24 for a year's online subscription.  The pitfall of doing that is, the OCR technology that is used to do such conversion causes the excel spreadsheet to come out in the exact same format of the Pdf brokerage statement where one stock transaction was spread out in multiple lines.  This means I had to scrub the excel spread sheet to put the data in the import format specified by Intuit Tax Online.  This took quite some time too, even though it was still somewhat faster than typing into the software from scratch.  

How about you, what type of tax software do you use in your tax practice?  Which tax software do you think  is the most efficient in terms of data entry?  I would really appreciate it if you could share your experience with me.