Trading tax software for last minute filers

I agree the matter is closed with the refund.

I think there are some true problems with tradelog and its customer support, primarily centered on its upgrade mechanism & how they provide it. Davide Eich can choose to fix them, see the light, start rendering courteous understanding customer support, perhaps bullet-proof his upgrades a bit better before posting them, and perhaps come up with a more certain way for customers to get at those upgrades.

Or he can continue doing what he's doing... blaming his customers, fidelity, the world,... and treating any criticism of his product as a personal attack. Calling David Eich "a dick" may be a somewhat abbreviated epithet standing in for these rather objective observations on my part, but if I were given only a word or two to describe this individual after my interaction with him today, I wouldn't consider this epithet very far off the mark.

And prospective customers should be forewarned, which I think they now may be.

I agree, refunding the purchase price concludes the issue so far as I'm concerned.

For what it's worth and for the record, I actually rather like tradelog when it does work. The features offered are in some ways superior to gainskeeper. If only it worked consistently.
 
I agree the matter is closed with the refund.

I think there are some true problems with tradelog and its customer support, primarily centered on its upgrade mechanism & how they provide it. Davide Eich can choose to fix them, see the light, start rendering courteous understanding customer support, perhaps bullet-proof his upgrades a bit better before posting them, and perhaps come up with a more certain way for customers to get at those upgrades. In the end, criticism from users really should be seen as a gift, if a software firm is to grow & improve.

Or he can continue doing what he's doing... blaming his customers, fidelity, the world,... and treating any criticism of his product as a personal attack. Calling David Eich "a dick" may be a somewhat abbreviated epithet standing in for these rather objective observations on my part, but if I were given only a word or two to describe this individual after my interaction with him today, I wouldn't consider this epithet very far off the mark at all.

And prospective customers should be forewarned, which I think they now may be.

I agree, refunding the purchase price concludes the issue so far as I'm concerned.

For what it's worth and for the record, I actually rather like tradelog when it does work. The features offered are in some ways superior to gainskeeper. If only it worked consistently without breaking everytime there is an "upgrade".
 
Quote from Jeffrey:

TurboTax can download up to 3,000 transactions, and wash sales are included as a transaction. You don't need gainskeeper or tradelog unless you have more transactions.
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The problem is that most brokers do not calculate wash sales, nor do they get them right whent they do. In addition TurboTax cannot handle wash sales on unequal numbers of shares traded such as when you sell 1000 shares at a loss and only repurchase 200 shares within the 30 day window. In this case you do NOT want to disallow the full loss on the 1000 hares but only 20% of it.

What if you have more than one brokerage account? According to the IRS rules you have to calculate wash sales across all accounts. This scenario is also not supported by Turbotax, nor your brokerage.

It has also been our experience, as well the experience of many CPA's, that you cannot rely on broker provided P&L statements for doing your taxes because they routinely do not get your cost basis correct, especially for open positions from the previous year and for stocks that go through splits, mergers, and name changes.

So importing a flawed report into Turbotax will only result in a flawed schedule d and more importantly there is no way to know this or correct it.
 
Quote from Jeffrey:

TurboTax asked you if you want to directly download the tax information from your broker. It has a list of brokers for you to chose yours. Most are there.

TurboTax can download up to 3,000 transactions, and wash sales are included as a transaction. You don't need gainskeeper or tradelog unless you have more transactions.

TurboTax has customer service that will walk through any problems. When they are busy, last three weeks until April 15, you will end up on hold for an hour or more.

I use Premium version, but call to make sure you get the right product to do what you want.

If you use Quicken Financial Software to download and track your trades TurboTax will download IB from your Quicken account. I didn't see TS in the participating Broker access.
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TurboTax will let you download directly from your broker, however, the list of usable brokers is very limited. They are geared more to the investment houses than the electronic trading groups. The list does not include Tradestation or IB. I don't make thousands of trades, but entering all of the data for 30 or 40 transactions can be cumbersome.
Quicken would be a nice alternative for me, however, the version I have does not include Tradestaion for direct download. I have heard that Quicken 2008 may include both TS and IB on their list for direct access.
 
Quote from aicohn:

I agree the matter is closed with the refund.
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Evidently the matter is not closed as Mr. Cohn continues to bad mouth our company and me personally, and continues to use language that is most unprofessional. I am not sure how we "can be friends."

Anyone who has read all these posts should be able to see that our upgrades were not flawed, only the delivery method (download from the internet) which is beyond our control and which has worked fine for the past 7 years, and has only recently become a problem with less than 1% of our users. I am not making excuses, only stating the facts.

As an example, I spoke with one of our customers who could not get a valid download from each of his 3 PC's on his home network. He finally took one of these (a laptop) to a local coffee shop with wireless access and downloaded the setup file with no problems. We changed nothing on our end. Since we cannot find a solution to this problem, and our web hosting company has no suggestions, we added the ability to email the software to our users without customer support doing this manually.

PS: If anyone has a solution to this we are more than happy to hear about it as we have exhausted our research on the subject.

No blame has ever been put on Fidelity, we merely explained that we had to provide an update to our "brokerConnect" import method because Fidelity changed something on their site that made the user login procedure stop working properly. When we were made aware of this problem we posted an update. How hard is this to understand?

By the way, brokerConnect™ is our import method where the user does not have to do the extra steps of opening their web browser, logging into their online account, navigating to their trade history page, entering a start and end date, downloading a csv file, saving it to their PC, and then finding and importing it into our software.

We don't shy away from criticism. As a matter of fact we take this very seriously as it has caused us to improve our software over and over again. Most of this improvement came by customer request. But when we get someone who is simply out to defame us we have no choice but to respond with the facts.

I hope that readers of this forum can see through this defamation of character and realize that you can't please everyone. Some people are just out to do as much damage as they can to someone else's reputation when they get disgruntled or things don't go their way.
 
Quote from EliteEd:

I have heard that Quicken 2008 may include both TS and IB on their list for direct access.
More...
This may be nice but it will still do nothing for the wash sale problem. The IRS code is quite clear that all wash sales MUST be reported.
 
I can only offer my experience using TurboTax Personal and Business. I have done my own taxes through the 90’s running a small business. I also used Quicken Home & Business Financial Software.

For position trading, I use Fidelity. I directly downloaded about 350 transactions into TurboTax for the 2007 tax year. If you have more than one account they are downloaded in order, so you know where the end/start of another account begins. If one account is personal and another is business you know where to start deleting unwanted transactions. This would be a flawed report if the taxpayer does not keep up with managing and keeping records, or reconciling monthly statements of their accounts.
This can be a problem having to delete one by one if you find it too menial. I expect TurboTax getting better at handling these transactions and including more brokers. I hope they get as efficient as Tradelog, or Gainskeeper.(Never used them) This should happen as more and more customers provide feedback.
I found it easier to manage Fidelity accounts on Fidelity’s website. It became too hard to keep up answering the correct questions as to splits, dividends, lots, etc.


In the case with MB Trading they are not listed within Quickens Participating Financial Institutions, but customers can download their transactions to either Quicken or Money by going to the MB website, choosing a range, and clicking a download button, while your Quicken software is open. Just wait less than a minute and it automatically enters the correct Quicken account.
The Think or Swim customer would know if they can download into Quicken or by calling customer service. Then from Quicken you can download into TurboTax.

The reason I spent time on this post is that I feel very organized, no stress. One-Click Update feature in Quicken and I managed three rental properties including a like kind exchange last year. You need to have a good understanding of categorizing transactions, but, for me, it was worth learning. Because of the link kind exchange, I was thinking that I might end up going to a CPA, but TurboTax got me through it.

Jeffrey
 

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They are downloaded from Fidelity website I suppose.

I called the IRS while and let them know exactly how I was doing it, while specifically asking about a missing transaction that was transfered from another broker years ago. And that broker did not keep records that far back. So, I had to give it my best estimate on the cost basis.

TRINA SOLAR
2 May 07 bought 800 shares
8 May 07 bought 500 shares
14 June 07 Sold 1300 shares

Here is a snap shot of TRINA trade with wash sales included. (Ignore the first three transactions they are not part of the wash sales.)
 

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There was a difference in the long term gain reported on the 1099 and what I reported in TurboTax, and it was because Fidelity did not have the cost basis for that one stock.

The IRS said that what I put down is the important number as long as I can justify it.

I made the best estimate possible.

Jeffrey
 
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