Split Expenses for Vacation Rental with personal use days

[Mark42]

I have a vacation home that I rent out as a short term rental.  I enter the personal use days, and rental days, and TurboTax calculates the expenses that can be deducted as rental property expenses based on the ratio of personal use days to rental use days.  That's fine for things like utilities.  But some expenses, like Cleaning and Maintenance, and transient occupancy tax, which are 100% rental expenses, should not be split.  So, I go into the Schedule E worksheet form and override these expense values reported on Schedule E.  But then I get an error, it says that these values should not be overridden and changed for electronic filing.  Using an override can prevent the cross-checking thats important to an accurate tax return.  Any way around this?  Can I ignore the error and file anyway?  The only way I can think of is to declare zero personal use days, and then calculate the values manually.  But I don't really want to declare zero personal use days when I actually have quite a lot.

[tagteam · Accepted solution]

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@Mark42 wrote:

Any way around this?  Can I ignore the error and file anyway?

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No, you cannot ignore the error and e-file. For some expenses, such as advertising, commissions, management fees, et al, the program allocates 100% to Schedule E. For others, however, such as repairs, the program will do a split accordingly (of which you are already aware).

You can use your workaround but it would be better if you simply did the math yourself and entered that figure on the worksheet. For example, if you had a repair costing $1,000 during a rental period and your personal use was 10%, the program will allocate around $900 to Schedule E rather than $1,000. To resolve this issue, you could simply enter $1,100 on the worksheet (or whatever figure will get $1,000 in the Schedule E column). The worksheet will not be transmitted with your return so there should not be any issues with entering a different figure.