Thanks. I understand all about allocation of personal/business expenses as we have had small amounts of personal use over the years. However when I get into the questions about the sale, the program is actually asking for business use portion of the selling price and selling expenses (closing costs). I havent gone down that path yet, it is what I am trying to understand. So for example given the numbers I gave in my original post, it seems like I would take the % of business use from each of the 14 years returns and divide this by the total use and then use this percentage to allocate amount of sale price and sale expenses to business use. Simplifying as an example suppose one had a property for 5 years where 4 years were 100% business use and one year was 90% business use ...total use is 5 x 100% = 500, business use is 4 x 100 + 1 x 90 = 490, ratio would be 490/500 or 0.98 . Allocate 98% of sale price and sale expenses to form 4797 and 2% of sale price and sale expenses somewhere else on the personal side. One would think that the gain is going to be the same but there must be some reason to do this related to deducting business losses having different rules than personal losses. In our case we have a gain because of having sold the property about what we paid but having taken enough depreciation to make sale an overall gain in 2020 tax year. Can you verify whether I am on the right track with this thinking, thanks.
