topic Two zeros get added to an entered number (the number gets multiplied by 100) each time I press the Enter key! in Get your taxes done using TurboTax

Two zeros get added to an entered number (the number gets multiplied by 100) each time I press the Enter key!

fa123 — Fri, 05 Mar 2021 07:26:44 GMT

I am reporting a bug that showed up in Turbotax 2018 or 2019, if memory serves, and still persists even in Turbotax 2020.

At some point Turbotax people decided they don't want to deal with cents anymore. Well, that is fine, if the program still allows the user to enter the cents, as in 10.47, and then just round it to 10.00. But in most (if not all) cases, Turbotax just "expects" the user to enter a whole number, without any cents. If I type 10.47 for the value of a field and press the Enter key, the number that Turbotax takes for and shows in the field becomes 1,047.00. Even if I enter 10.00 and press the Enter key, the number for the field becomes 1,000.00. Worse, as long as the current input field is the same, every time I press the Enter key, Turbotax adds two more zeros to the number. So, if I type10.47 and press Enter, it becomes 1,047.00; press Enter again, it changes to 104,700.00; press Enter once more and it turns into 10,470,000.00; etc., until finally Turbotax says something like "this number is too large for this field."

It seems like every time I press the Enter key, Turbotax takes whatever the current field contains (e.g., 1,047.00); ignores any decimal point and/or commas that it may contain; considers the result (i.e., 104700), as a new entry for the field; to which it then adds comma separators and a ".00" at the end (104,700.00); and stuffs it back into the field.

This is clearly a program bug, and it is extremely annoying. In cases where pressing the Enter key jumps from the current field to the next field, this bug multiplies the content of the current field by 100 before it jumps to the next field. Thus, simply visiting previously entered data by pressing Enter to skip over the fields, multiplies them by 100, each time!

This bug has been there for at least 2-3 years, but I see no one else having reported it. I wonder why.

Re: Two zeros get added to an entered number (the number gets multiplied by 100) each time I press the Enter key!

fa123 — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 13:42:28 GMT

I was asked to add screenshots of this problem. As I mentioned, this problem occurs in MOST places where I want to enter dollar amounts, but here, I will demonstrate it in a case of adding a Supporting Detail list.

The following screenshot shows I am about to enter the information in a 1099-INT form for some fictitious bank.

Now I right-click to add a Supporting Detail list for Box 1:

I enter "item 1" as Description and hit Return:

Now I enter 10.47 in the Amount field:

And hit the Return key:

As you see, my $10.47 entry has been changed into $1,047.00 just by hitting the Return key. But it gets worse! Now I enter "item 2" as description for the nest item:

and enter 20.00 for the amount:

And click on the "close" to close the Supporting Details list to get:

So, my original $10.47 amount for "item 1" was changed to $1,047.00 as we saw in earlier screenshots. However, that (incorrect) $1,047.00 amount plus the $20.00 that I entered for "item 2" now adds up to not even (incorrect) $1,067.00 by simple rules of arithmetic, but to a total sum of $304,700.00 by the rules of Turbotax arithmetic!!! Recall that the correct sum of the two amounts that I entered is 10.47 + 20.00 = 30.47.

Now, astonished by having received over $300,000.00 in interest from this bank, I right click again to open the same Supporting Details list. Before anything is opened, I see the total magically increase once again:

And then the same list opens to show:

which at least does make some bizarre sense (in the sense that both my original entries of 10.47 and 20.00 have been consistently multiplied by 100, only).

But, by just hitting the Return key to skip through the list entries, the numbers in the list get multiplied by 100 once more, as you see for the case of the amount on the first line here:

And clicking on "close" to close the list, multiplies the whole (incorrect) sum by 100 one more time:

Once again, this is just an example. This same bug shows up in MOST places where I enter a number, whether it is is a Supporting Detail list or other form entries.

Re: Two zeros get added to an entered number (the number gets multiplied by 100) each time I press the Enter key!

DoninGA — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 14:00:58 GMT

@fa123 Is your software up to date? The latest TurboTax for Windows version is 020.000.1654. Click on Help and then About TurboTax and the Version.

I have the TurboTax 2020 Premier for Windows edition and do not have the problem you have posted.

If your version is up to date then suggest you do a manual update - https://ttlc.intuit.com/community/updating/help/manually-update-turbotax-for-windows-software-basic-deluxe-premier-home-business/01/26041

Re: Two zeros get added to an entered number (the number gets multiplied by 100) each time I press the Enter key!

fa123 — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 14:38:52 GMT

@DoninGAYes, my software *is* up to date. It is the Windows Delux version.

As I stated in my original post, this bug showed up a few years ago; I had no problem like this before (I have been using Turbotax for a few decades now). I've had to VERY carefully work my way around this bug for at least 3 years now with at least three versions of Turbotax (perhaps more).

I am surprised that no one else seems to have reported this bug.

Perhaps this bugs stems from the fact that I have been using Turbotax for much longer than most people and every year have it transfer my data from my previous year returns. Perhaps there is some incompatibility that was introduced between the internal structures of forms a few years ago and the bug arises out of improper conversion of such internal structures? I have no clue. But the bug is real and it has been there for a couple of years in different versions of Turbotax.

Re: Two zeros get added to an entered number (the number gets multiplied by 100) each time I press the Enter key!

DoninGA — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 14:48:17 GMT

@fa123 I too have been using TurboTax in one form or another since about 1989 and all with the desktop software and have never run across this type of problem.

Since this started in prior years have you uninstalled the software for each tax year since it started? I would try that and also uninstall and then re-install the 2020 software.

Something I have noticed in the last few years is I needed to run the software as an administrator since some of the pages in the program were not responsive until I did that.

Try this if you have not already -

Close the TurboTax program

Right click on the TurboTax icon

Click on Properties

Click on the Compatibility tab

Check the box Run this program as an administrator

Click on Apply and on OK

Re: Two zeros get added to an entered number (the number gets multiplied by 100) each time I press the Enter key!

DoninGA — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 14:54:49 GMT

@SteamTrain Do you remember seeing this problem before as is being reported by user @fa123

Re: Two zeros get added to an entered number (the number gets multiplied by 100) each time I press the Enter key!

SteamTrain — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 14:59:07 GMT

Now...that DOES happen if you hit a comma instead of a period for the decimal point

IF you are clearly using a period key...try the keypad decimal point instead

if that doesn't work, then maybe you have your keyboard set to some European format....those folks tend to use commas instead of periods, and periods for the commas....that might be some keyboard format setting you have set up on your computer

___________________

Re: Two zeros get added to an entered number (the number gets multiplied by 100) each time I press the Enter key!

SteamTrain — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 16:01:28 GMT

@fa123

Ok.....only some of that happens with commas instead of decimal points.......but that does not explain all of what you see.

$10.47 entered as 10comma47 turning into 1047.00 is the normal behavior of the software, and is entirely an entry error issue...BUT....the added mess of numbers propagating to huge values that you are seeing is just something no one else has ever reported.

I would start to suspect some computer-specific software/CPU compatibility issue on your computer.....something that might happen to 1 in 1million computers .....but in 20 some years of using TTX, I have never seen anyone report anything other than the simple comma-vs-decimal entry mistake.

Time to try installing TTX on an entirely different computer?

Re: Two zeros get added to an entered number (the number gets multiplied by 100) each time I press the Enter key!

fa123 — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 17:27:45 GMT

@DoninGAI did uninstall previous year versions and reinstall the 2020 version again. I also made sure it runs as administrator. No difference. Same thing happens again.

@SteamTrainNo, this is not a comma vs period issue. As you see in my screenshots I actually enter a period not a comma for the decimal point. I use a US keyboard and my PC is a Dell XPS desktop, with Intel i5 CPU and US English settings, running up-to-date Windows 10 Home edition.

I also do not buy the software/CPU specific compatibility explanation. This happens only in Turbotax and only for many but not all numeric fields. There simply is not enough consistency to this bug to be attributed to anything other than a bug in Turbotax that was introduced a few years back when they decided to round dollar amounts to nearest whole dollar.

As for another PC, last year I started my 2019 on my laptop (a Dell XPS, Intel i7 CPU, Windows 10 Enterprise) because I was away from my desktop, and I had the same issue there, as well.

We have a REAL BUG in Turbotax software here. Now there are three things Turbotax and the community can do about it: (1) pretend this is not a Turbotax issue and try to blame it on something or someone else; (2) find work-arounds to live with it; or (3) take it seriously as a bug in Turbotax software and assign programming resources to find its cause and resolve it. Personally, I don't care for engaging with the first alternative. I have silently put up with the inconvenience of the second alternative doing my taxes with Turbotax for a couple of years now, including 2020. I think it is about time Turbotax engaged in the third alternative.

The fact that in 20 some years you have not encountered anyone reporting something like this does not make this issue any less of a bug or its impact any less significant. As I said, this bug showed up only a few years ago (not decades ago), and I concur with you that no one else seems to have reported it in the past. Nevertheless, no one knows how many people did actually encounter it in the past few years, but like me just silently found a way to work around it or perhaps even abandoned Turbotax altogether for other alternatives.

If anyone cares, my work-around is simply never enter cents and never skip over entries hitting Return, and ALWAYS check and double check each entry after Turbotax stops churning the latest entry. A laborious, inconvenient solution, but ... I've kept my fingers crossed for a couple of years hoping for the next version of Turbotax to be revamped enough not to have this bug. Finally this year, I decided to report it (and I'm sure people realize that properly reporting a bug and following it up is a quite time-consuming effort, actually).

The first thing a software, any software, must make sure it does correctly is that if I enter 10.47 by typing in a "1" a "0" a "." a "4" and a "7" following which I actually see "10.47" on the screen, then 10.47 should remain the value of the field once I hit the Return key, and the value of this field must remain 10.47 no matter how many times I visit it or open and close its containing form/list. Turbotax software fails this simple basic requirement of correctness! They better own it up.

Re: Two zeros get added to an entered number (the number gets multiplied by 100) each time I press the Enter key!

SteamTrain — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 17:50:12 GMT

I don't know what you expect TTX to own up to if no one else ahs ever reported this particular problem....and some of us "helpers" have gone over hundreds-of-thousands of 'issues" over the years. ....I think you'd have to contact Customer Support and see if they can do anything. At best they could provide you with an entirely new installation software file.

Virtually all of use helpers in here (not TTX employees), and virtually all the "CHAMP"s (like Don) use the desktop software with the Supporting Details sheets with no issues like that. I've tried it on mine six ways from Sunday too, with & without cents, and Carriage returns...etc... nothing like that showing up. (only one or two helpers bother with the Online software for our own tax files).

Certainly @DoninGA can poll the other CHAMPs in their internal communication space to see if any of the other specialists have encountered anything like this.

____________________________________________________

I have little else to offer myself.

Just...make sure you are only creating and working on your tax files on the main system hard disk...not on any flash drive or usb-connected hard drive.

Re: Two zeros get added to an entered number (the number gets multiplied by 100) each time I press the Enter key!

fa123 — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 19:31:31 GMT

@SteamTrainI understand the difference between the community and its "helpers" like you, on the one hand, and Turbotax and its employees, on the other. I also very much appreciate what "Champs" and experienced helpers like you do in the community helping others. If any text in my message suggested otherwise, I apologize, because that was not al all my intention.

As for what I expect from Turbotax, of course, I do/did not expect them to act on a bug that has not been brought to their attention. I meant that now that I have reported it, I hope someone from their team takes this seriously enough to look into it. I would be happy to cooperate and provide as much technical detail as possible to help them zoom on the cause of this bug and fix it. This is clearly something for their software team, not for community members.

I understand and appreciate all feedback and proposed ideas from you (and @DoninGA). I know you are merely offering ideas and suggesting things that you think may help based on your past experience. That said, yes, all my Turbotax installations and files, etc., are and have always been on the main hard disk of the PC, no flash drive or USB connected disk, networked disk, or cloud, etc. If working with file in such configurations may cause problems, I have never encountered any, because I have never used such configurations.

Re: Two zeros get added to an entered number (the number gets multiplied by 100) each time I press the Enter key!

DoninGA — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 19:37:12 GMT

@fa123 Suggest that you contact TurboTax support tomorrow since this is a Sunday and there probably are not any Technical support folks available.

When you speak with an agent make sure that they understand you need technical support and not tax return support.

TurboTax support is open from 5am to 9pm Pacific time, 7 days a week during tax season.

Use this website to contact TurboTax support during business hours - https://support.turbotax.intuit.com/contact/

Re: Two zeros get added to an entered number (the number gets multiplied by 100) each time I press the Enter key!

fa123 — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 20:00:35 GMT

Oh, BTW, I have not been able to contact the technical support people at Turbotax on the phone. This is why I tried to report this bug here in detail, so that perhaps someone calls them to pay attention to it.

In the process of reporting a different bug last week (see https://ttlc.intuit.com/community/state-taxes/discussion/re-turbotax-wants-an-outrageous-250-state-e-filiing-fee/01/2067628#M92561), I was told to contact their technical support by phone. I went to the proper link, filled the necessary information, and obtained a support id with a phone number to call. I called the number several times, but never managed to get through past the phone answering bot to talk to a real human being.

Because of where I am, I have to use VOIP to call them and VOIP connection quality is sometimes not good enough for speech recognition technology. Most other organizations that use answering phone bots allow you to either speak your response or enter a DTMF tone (as in if ... say ... or press 1. etc.). They do so exactly because VOIP or otherwise, telecommunication technology sometimes distorts speech enough to befuddle contemporary speech recognition technology and having the DTMF alternative offers people a safer option. With or without the DTMF option, most organizations program their answering bots such that if it fails n times to understand a caller's selection, it puts the caller in a queue to talk to a human representative. I wasted close to a total of one hour making several calls to Turbotax support 800-number hoping to manage to get past their answering bot to talk to a human representative. It kept me in a loop saying it does not understand my selection, never offering me to press any keys, not accepting any of my pressed keys, and I did not manage to "wear it out" to give up and pass me on to a human representative either. This was an extremely frustrating experience.

As I see it, Turbotax has configured their answering phone bot to discourage complaints. All I got was a bot that kept me in an endless loop and the best it had to offer was to stuff some canned material into my sms or email. So, I will not try to initiate a call to Turbotax support to report this (or any other) bug.

Re: Two zeros get added to an entered number (the number gets multiplied by 100) each time I press the Enter key!

DoninGA — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 20:14:45 GMT

@fa123 Ok... I will forward this post to one of the TurboTax Moderators of this forum and they may be able to get you to the proper technical personnel. You probably will not get a response from them until tomorrow or the next day. They will more than likely send you a Private Message.

Re: Two zeros get added to an entered number (the number gets multiplied by 100) each time I press the Enter key!

fa123 — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 20:13:28 GMT

Thank you! I appreciate that.

Re: Two zeros get added to an entered number (the number gets multiplied by 100) each time I press the Enter key!

rjs — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 22:14:02 GMT

@fa123 If you start a new tax return from scratch, without transferring from last year (just as a test), does the same problem occur in the new return, or is it only in your return with information that has been carried forward for years?

Re: Two zeros get added to an entered number (the number gets multiplied by 100) each time I press the Enter key!

fa123 — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 17:40:51 GMT

@rjsVery good point. I actually had not tried this before (I don't know why, it is such an obvious thing to try). I was so hoping that this would work and then we could localize the problem to the transfer function of Turbotax.

I just tried it now and started a new 2020 return from scratch, without transferring anything. Unfortunately, yes, the exact same thing happens here too.

So here I start with a fresh return, no transfer, enter enough data to get myself to entering a 1099-INT form (just for a direct comparison to my previous posts). Here is the initial screenshot where I enter the name of the bank:

Now I open a Supporting Document list for the Amount field and enter "Item A" for the description of the first item:

After pressing the Return key, I type in 10.58 for Amount:

And then hit the Return key and see:

I type "Item B" and get:

Now I type 20.00 for the Amount:

And click on "close" and see 305,800.00 as the total for 10.58 + 20.00!!!

Next, I right-click to open the same Supporting Detail list, but before I select the menu item to actually open it, I see the interest income value get multiplied by 100:

And here is when the list is actually opened. Observe the total in the list, and compare it with the total in the Interest income field (once again increased by 100 times compared to its value in the previous screenshot:

And I just click on "close" to close the list without having changed any of the items in the list:

I think this answers your question.

Re: Two zeros get added to an entered number (the number gets multiplied by 100) each time I press the Enter key!

SteamTrain — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 18:50:39 GMT

Hmmmm....I was wondering.....does it only happen when the Supporting Details sheet is used ?

i.e. if you delete thee SD sheet, and only put in the initial interest $10.58 in the main field, does that always remain the same proper value? or does that end up jumping by 100's too?

Re: Two zeros get added to an entered number (the number gets multiplied by 100) each time I press the Enter key!

rjs — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 19:35:36 GMT

I know you said you have a US keyboard and "US English settings," but this sure seems like a localization problem of some sort. TurboTax is strictly a U.S. tax program. It's designed to run on U.S. computers, and does not work with other region, language, or localization settings. I gather that you are not in the United States, so maybe something you are doing to adapt to your location is contributing to the problem you are having.

Do you have multiple keyboards on your computer? If so, when you are using TurboTax, click on the language icon on the taskbar and make sure that English (United States), US Keyboard is selected.

Please double-check all of the following settings, just to be sure. Something obscure might have gotten changed accidentally.

Go to Settings > Time & Language > Region.

Country or region should be United States.

Regional format should be English (United States).

On the left side, click Language.

There are several icons at the top of the Language panel. They should all say "English (United States)."

Windows display language should be English (United States).

Under Preferred languages, is more than one language listed? If so, English (United States) should be first in the list. If it's not, click on it and move it up to the top.

Click on the Keyboard icon at the top. On the Keyboard panel, "Override for default input method" should say "Use language list" or English (United States) - US. This is assuming that English (United States) is at the top of the Preferred languages list.

Is the box checked that says "Let me use a different input method for each app window"? I don't know how that works. If that box is checked, you have to make sure that you are using English (United States), US Keyboard in the TurboTax window.

Go back to Region. On the right side, scroll down a bit to Related settings and click "Additional date, time & regional settings." This will open a Control Panel window. In the Control Panel window, click on Region. At the bottom of the Region window, click "Additional settings."

On the Numbers tab, check all of the following. The period and comma can be hard to see, especially on a laptop screen. Look very carefully.
Decimal symbol: . (period)
No. of digits after decimal: 2
Digit grouping symbol: , (comma)
Digit grouping: 123,456,789

On the Currency tab, check the following.
Currency symbol: $
Decimal symbol: . (period)
No. of digits after decimal: 2
Digit grouping symbol: , (comma)
Digit grouping: 123,456,789

Re: Two zeros get added to an entered number (the number gets multiplied by 100) each time I press the Enter key!

SteamTrain — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 22:15:38 GMT

Yeah...I was thinking that too, and brought it up earlier...but didn't pursue since some of it didn't seem to fit with some of his multiple <Enter> blowups. but thinking about it again...that could still be the issue.

A number of European countries use decimals as thousands separators instead of commas, and commas where we use decimals, and that could blow up those numbers in a totally confusing way.

Thus a USA 10,000.34 is a European 10.000,34

So how does the software treat those numbers if the region setting is set to one of those reverse numerical separator regions ?