Help on entering Option trades in Quicken

H

hajimow

I used to enter my orders manually in a spread sheet for my tax but this year I decided to use Quicken so that it will be easier to download it into Turbotax. It seems that I have problem doing that and I need help. Now my questions are:
Are there any software that is commonly used by traders to keep track of their trades for ease of entering them into tax form?
Second question: I just started to enter my trades into quicken. My broker is IB and I have no problem downloading them into quicken but I can not match the trades. An example will show my problem better. I entered all my trades for Jan 2005 and I had a couple of short Calls and Puts that expired on 1/21/05. It shows that I bought those options (shares) at zero dollar and puts a place holder for that position on 1/3/05. I manually entered those short postions that I traded in say December 2004 as short sale orders and then I changed the "buy" transaction on 1/21/05 to "buy to cover" transaction and I could match these two orders together but that placeholder is still there and I can not delete it. I could not find a good help in Quicken that could help me. Any help would greatly be appreciated.
 
This year I too have purchased Turbo Tax to do my taxes. It has turned into a huge frustration and I want to warn others before they go down the same path.

While using TurboTax to enter my tax data, I got to the part where I'm supposed to enter my stock transactions. Since I'm an active trader, I have hundreds of transactions. While in the software, TurboTax recommended that I upgrade to the Premiere edition to make entering these transactions easier. I got out my credit card and paid them an extra $50 for the upgrade on the spot. Turned out this didn't help. If anything the Premiere edition data entry screen was more time consuming and difficult to enter to. The software recommended I purchase Quicken--this way I could download my transactions from my broker to Quicken to TurboTax. Once again, being the naive person I can be, I got out my credit card, and paid an additional $89.95 for Quicken Premiere.

I was able to download my stock transactions from Interactive Brokers to Quicken rather easily. However as the previous poster noted, the transactions in Quicken do not match up. Nor do they add up to the correct total for the year. There seem to be random phantom entries that need to be removed.

To solve this problem, I downloaded all the Quicken transactions into Excel (I'm nothing if not persistent) and after about a day's work I found all the errors and manually corrected them in Quicken. I thought that now...at last...I'm finally able to download my Quicken transactions into TurboTax. Wrong.

The TurboTax software says I don't have Quicken installed. I try everything I can think of. The manuals of both Quicken and TurboTax are no help. Finally, I call TurboTax. They say they can't help me. They give me Quicken's number. I call Quicken. Mind you, you hold about 20 minutes for the privilege of not being helped each time. Quicken says I have to pay them $25 before they will tell me how to download my transactions from Quicken to TT. At this point I am loathe to throw anymore good money after bad. The rep suggested I use LiveHelp at quicken.com. I go there, type in my question, and receive a response saying this question can't be answered at LiveHelp. And that's where I am right now.

I came to EliteTrader hoping to shed some light on my situation, but it seems all my search found was one other frustrated TurboTax/Quicken user.

If anybody can recommend a solution to get my taxes done, I'm all ears. Thanks for listening.
 
First, back up your tax file. Don't want to screw up what you've already worked to get.

Try uninstalling and then reinstalling TurboTax. I'm guessing it'll see Quicken is installed. That might clear up the problem.

OR

Look for a way to export to a .txf from Quicken. TurboTax can import a .txf file. That's how I got my trades into TurboTax (from my broker).

Good luck
 
This is what I've been doing for years.

I do NOT import trades into Turbo Tax.

I use Quicken for some trades, but the majority are logged in excel, by a custom program I wrote. I import from IB, and did so even before they offered flexibility.


To make a long story short, I create a Sched D out of my spreadsheet. That gets printed out at attached to my return. The grand totals are entered on the actual Sced D, the itemized trades are on my Excel based sheet.

Sounds like a lot of hassle and it is, but I am not at the mercy of Turbo Tax/Quicken .
 
I read in one of the threads that some traders use tradekeeper

http://americanware.homeip.net/tk/index.htm

I have not bought it yet because I thought Quicken and Turbotax can get along better since they are from the same company. I bout my 2006 Quicken copy from Ebay at $17 shipping included. (Just the CD). Definitely 2004 version had a bug. It is extreemely painful to enter the trades if it is your first time that you are using Quicken (like me ) and you are doing the whole year at once with no good online help from Quicken.
 
Quote from hajimow:

I used to enter my orders manually in a spread sheet for my tax but this year I decided to use Quicken so that it will be easier to download it into Turbotax. It seems that I have problem doing that and I need help. Now my questions are:
Are there any software that is commonly used by traders to keep track of their trades for ease of entering them into tax form?
Second question: I just started to enter my trades into quicken. My broker is IB and I have no problem downloading them into quicken but I can not match the trades. An example will show my problem better. I entered all my trades for Jan 2005 and I had a couple of short Calls and Puts that expired on 1/21/05. It shows that I bought those options (shares) at zero dollar and puts a place holder for that position on 1/3/05. I manually entered those short positions that I traded in say December 2004 as short sale orders and then I changed the "buy" transaction on 1/21/05 to "buy to cover" transaction and I could match these two orders together but that placeholder is still there and I can not delete it. I could not find a good help in Quicken that could help me. Any help would greatly be appreciated.
More...
I have used Microsoft Money for years with many brokers and it also has some problems, but it is usable. For the last 4 months I have used Money to download IB transactions with decent success. Actually the biggest problem is IB since they do not identify stock short sales properly. Because IB does not identify short sales properly I have to do a lot of manual adjusting, but it is workable. Option transactions seem to work okay.

However, I do not try and import Money transactions into Turbo Tax. Instead I import the Money transactions into a spread sheet that I format as a Sched D attachment. I don't have any LT cap gains and I don't have any straddle or wash transactions that span tax years so I report all my transactions independently without having to cope with the complexity of straddle or wash sale forms.

Don
 
You guys are making me shiver. I tried using turbo tax two years ago. Manually imported 800 trades(my broker wasn't supported)..yes 800 in one afternoon. Was about to finish up and the program froze and I lost them all. Then I came across www.armencomp.com and bought tradelog. It paid for itself in an hour...no joke. Import from broker to tradelog to turbotax..done. Check it out.
 
Thank you everybody for your advice.

Ultimately I resolved my Quicken/TurboTax problem by doing as one other poster said he did...I used the Excel spreadsheet I already had of all my transactions in and simply reformatted them to fit the Sch. D-1 format, then manually attached to Sch. D. You can't e-file your tax return this way and it's a lot of work, but finally it's done.

:cool:
 
I am trying to import my TradeLog "wash" sale file to turboTax but it will not go. Can some of you guys help me out? This is new to me and I will appreciate any help.:( :confused:
 
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