Why doesn’t it instruct you to just leave it blank? Or better yet accept a zero as also meaning blank. What the heck is the difference? That should be simple coding for sure. This year I found the program to be a bit frustrating to work through. I did my return a second time (just to double check myself) and there were obstacles that came up that didn’t come up the first time when entering my 1099-NEC’s. And, the first time I did not have any errors so it wasn’t asking me to fill in these new fields. What if I hadn’t gone back and did my return a second time? It’s bad enough having to do this, but it’s alarming to find that it acts differently just about every time you go back in day after day until you feel ok to transmit.
