Active traders using TurboTax?

G

gd2356

Has anyone tried the TurboTax Home and Business tax product for calculating taxes? Does it accommodate large numbers of trades? Or can it be used to input summary data? I bought the Deluxe edition, and note that it is very awkward to put in summary information. It won't allow you to put in large Gross Proceeds numbers. It would be ideal to have one entry, "Interactive Brokers", and put in the large Gross Proceeds number, then attach the detailed statement from IB.

Does anyone know if the new IB reports can be imported directly to TurboTax? I hesitate to do this, since I have thousands of trades, but INTUIT claims that TurboTax can import from Etrade and "other" brokerages.

Do many very active traders use Turbotax?

Thanks,

GD
 
I use TurboTax but have Fidelity. I tried importing but Fidelity breaks each trade into it's subtrades so it was a big mess. (I.e. if a 100 share trade excuted as 30, 35 and 35 shares, it would list as 3 trades).

It can handle any number of trades as far as I can tell but I don't know about summaries. What I do is I have a spreadsheet where I combine all the trades for a given stock for the year and list the entry/exit times as Variable - which turbotax supports. It's definitely the most annoying part of preparing taxes...
 
I use Turbotax, but I now primarily trade futures, which makes taxes really easy. However, when I traded stocks I used Turbotax in conjunction with Gainskeeper. Gainskeeper can be bit pricey, but it sure make figuring out all of the wash sales a lot easier. Gainskeeper then can be imported directly into Turbotax to populate the Schedule D form.
 
After reading the link post by bluedemon77, its appears that the Tradekeeper software is a lot cheaper than Gainskeeper--especially if you have thousands of trades. I would probably check that out first.
 
Quote from jbob:

I use Turbotax, but I now primarily trade futures, which makes taxes really easy. However, when I traded stocks I used Turbotax in conjunction with Gainskeeper. Gainskeeper can be bit pricey, but it sure make figuring out all of the wash sales a lot easier. Gainskeeper then can be imported directly into Turbotax to populate the Schedule D form.
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Does it have form 1256? I viewed a list of every product they have, and not one listed form 1256, which you must file for futures trades.
 
Quote from Jayford:

Does it have form 1256? I viewed a list of every product they have, and not one listed form 1256, which you must file for futures trades.
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If you mean Form 6781 Sec 1256 for Straddles then yes it had it last year and I assume it will this year when I install it.
 
TurboTax does provide a 1256. I traded futures as well, and I'm using the TurboTax Deluxe edition. I stopped trading stocks mid-year, so I don't have any wash issues, but I still have a lot of trades to report.

This year, IB is providing an IRS Schedule D attachment that can be printed out and attached. So I'm just entering a summary line in TurboTax for the total Gross Proceeds with the included dates.

One real hassle with TurboTax is that this summary line must have total Gross Proceeds less than 10, 000,000 or it won't let you enter the number. It really isn't too hard to get those kinds of numbers for gross proceeds if you trade a lot. I just divided them up into a few summary lines instead of just one. I hope they'll buy it.

I suppose the advantage of importing all these transactions into TurboTax via a TradeKeeper txf file would be that you could file electronically instead of printing everything out and sending them paper. I wonder, though, if TurboTax will vomit when it sees thousands of trades being imported.

Your comments are appreciated!

Regards,

GD
 
Quote from gd2356:

One real hassle with TurboTax is that this summary line must have total Gross Proceeds less than 10, 000,000 or it won't let you enter the number.
GD
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I put in $10,000,000 as gross proceeds and then a corresponding number as basis so that the net gain or loss and all the other computations are correct in TurboTax. Then I print out the forms; white out those two numbers; and replace them with the accurate numbers.
 
Quote from MustPlayOptions:

If you mean Form 6781 Sec 1256 for Straddles then yes it had it last year and I assume it will this year when I install it.
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Yep, that's the one. I've always called it by its Sec name. No wonder I couldn't find it!
Thanks.
 
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