Before forking over a bunch of money to Gainskeeper, I searched the web and found your comments here. I would like to give it a try, but have a question. Once you had downloaded all those useless transactions, how the heck did you get them out of TurboTax? I just want to remove the Ameritrade import and restart that section but can’t figure out how to get that done.

Thanks.

I chose other Other Program (TXF file). then selected file to import( i got this file from TDAmeritrade.

can some one explain what could be going wrong.

However, TT didn’t hesitate in throwing out that million-dollar figure, and I can’t imagine there are many people paying income taxes of seven digits who use software on their home computer to file. I’d like to suggest a flag in next year’s version (Did you really mean to list all those sales with no cost basis? Perhaps your broker offers an alternate download which includes them. or Alert- we show your income increased four hundred million gazillion percent over last year… is this correct?), and not just a happy Retrieve Successful! message. If they didn’t know (without being prompted) to immediately go to the Sched. D and investigate, many folks would never make it to the Final Review (where TT offers the option of entering cost basis manually), and with a million-dollar figure staring at them from the top left of their screen– they’d stop and get out before that, thinking something must be “wrong” with TT.

Alternatively, a simple and effective adjustment may be to have TT kick out the “please manually enter your cost basis” screen before leaving the income section of the interview.

The main intent of the post was to remind people to double-check (and not blindly click-and-trust; there must always be some level of personal responsibility involved), and also not to both download the 1099s as suggested during the “interview” and import (duplicate) data separately via the .TXF file (it’ll happily allow you to do both).

I’ve been a TurboTax user since 1999, even through the dark C-Dilla days (but I’m a good nerd and had Drive Image on standby, so no harm no foul), and I have no doubt about its ability to perform accurate calculations. Just concerned- as TT has been modified to be more user-friendly and penetrate the market of “you don’t have to be able to fill out a 1040 to do your own taxes”, it may be good to include more intra-interview alert flags for those people, not unlike the old Out- of- Range alerts on various software, but friendlier.

Old goats like me don’t get too flustered by an indication of 1.3m in taxes owed, and can discover the problem (which, as you point out, is the download) and the solution in 2 beers or less, but tender young trader/tax filers may get pretty confused and clog up your help lines or, worse for ya’ll, uninstall TT in a panic and use something else because they have no idea what happened, and the words on their screen only say “Success”.

I appreciate your taking the time to stop by, and I continue to encourage everyone I know to buy TurboTax and use it for what it is… a thoroughly excellent aid in speeding up the process of them doing their own taxes.

I hope this information helps.

Bob Meighan
VP, TurboTax

William O’Neil, IBD founder, says that if you ever see a company’s CEO on the cover of a national magazine that it’s time to sell… In Apple’s case, this would have taken you out of the long trade a little early, but I get his, and your, point.

Weak Durable Goods report… maybe stocks roll today?