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How to transfer previous tax years into turbo tax?

Taxes, especially filing taxes are a pain. The rest of the year seems nice and smooth without having to worry about taxes. Different people handle this differently by either doing it themselves, or hiring consulting agencies or maybe accountants to ensure taxes are filed properly. But let’s look into what it actually takes. Filing taxes for a particular year also needs historical information from last year. You need to collect last year’s capital gains, take into account the depreciation, and verify transactions too. That’s a lot of data to look at and for your accountant too. Turbo tax makes your tax returns an easy job by churning all the required data and you are only required to input some mandatory information. Read on to understand the process of transferring last year’s tax information to turbo tax.

a. Name your tax files appropriately and follow a similar naming convention for all of them, such as “your name_tax year”. Create your current year tax file and save it before you upload any other data to it. This ensures that no other data is added or deleted erroneously even.

b. Now go to Tax History in Tools to see what all previous tax years are already associated with your current year tax file. This is one way to check what all is already there and you can perform this check at any point of time during filing your taxes. If you would like to, you could even manually enter the tax summary details into the software.

c. If you find there are no files associated with the current year’s tax, move to the File tab and choose the Transfer option. This starts a search process on your system to scout for any tax files and move them to turbo tax. The software will locate files wherever they are so you just have to make sure they are present on your computer. And try to keep the naming convention similar across years. This way, it becomes easy to locate files and also to ensure that numbers are understood properly.

d. If you are not sure of the actual file name, you can always choose the files by type to get what you’re looking for. You have probably used other software like TaxAct or TaxCut or any other tax program. They are saved with the same file type extension. Once you know what file types you need to look for, you can pick from the available files. Now if you can’t find anything of the sort search for files with the extension such as .tax, .ta5 or .t05.

e. You may follow the same procedure while searching for these files on any other storage media too.

These steps ensures that you have all the data you need with you. All of it will be accessible with your current return. In case you have some other data that needs to be incorporated or have some other software, then contact customer support for better service.