After you file

I agree: TurboTax Premier 2024 (TT) is hard to use.  A big step backwards.  It's time for me to start investigating alternatives.  Here's a list of the problems I encountered:

1)  I let TT load info from last year's form, then let it download this year's documents from my brokerage, which got me to a screen similar to Picture 3 in ITTHatter's original post above.  The new documents were there, but there were also $0 ones for the same type of 1099 (i.e. a 1099-INT with $0 and a 1099-INT with the correct amount).  Very confusing.  They both said "Needs review" and both provided a "Review" button.  That led to the next problem.

2)  I clicked the Review button for one of the forms, but instead of opening info for that form so that I could review it,  TT went back to the screen asking me to enter the name of a bank or brokerage to download from.  WHY??  That just added to the confusion.  The Review button ought to at least go to a screen like ITTHatter's  Picture 2.

At that point, I was too nervous to continue, so I created a whole new return and entered my data by hand.  But then I still had a few things that I didn't know how to handle, so I created a third return and let TT download forms.  I at least had my manually entered return to compare to so that I could stay sane.  I also figured out that I could click on Forms and see the contents of each form and delete the bogus, useless $0 ones (I think they got created when the previous year info was imported, but they serve no purpose that I can see.)  I also figured out that I could click Wages & Income and "I'll choose what I'll work on" and get to something like Picture 2, from which I could get to the info for the individual forms.  The original Review button appears to be absolutely useless.  Clicking the button named "Confirm" at the bottom of the (Picture 3-ish) page is nerve-wracking when one doesn't understand the forms listed on the page, but does at least get to something like Picture 2.

3)  I had several disbursements from a traditional IRA, one (but only one) of which was a backdoor Roth conversion.  TurboTax only gave me two options for "What Did You Do With The Money From ..." for the 1099-R that documented the total disbursements: a) "I moved the money to another retirement account..." or b) "I did something else with it".  The correct answer in my case is "both", but TT doesn't offer that option.  I went to Google and saw instructions to choose option a.  I would be nice if that option read "I moved some or all of the money...." instead of "I moved the money..." (saying "the" money implies "all of" the money).

4) There used to be a button or menu option to click on to report bugs or make suggestions on the fly, but there doesn't seem to be one in this year's version.  It's much easier to report problems right when I notice them instead of having to wait and log in to a whole different system (and rely on my memory!) later.  Thanks to ITTHatter for the pictures in the original post.  They made my post much, much easier to write!

Intuit should work on improving its software development processes; the current ones are obviously flawed (their QuickBooks software has equally glaring "bugs" that ought to be caught internally before customers ever see them).  Both TT and QB are powerful pieces of software, and both do a lot of good things behind the scenes, but bugs like Review buttons that have nothing to do with reviewing data are, in my opinion, inexcusable in production code (I'd tolerate it better in beta releases). 

Thanks for reading; I know I get long-winded, especially when I'm annoyed.  I hope someone at intuit can get these things fixed.  Thanks! - JL