ItsDeductible Online is not importing to Desktop for 2024

[tucsonbill]

has anyone been able to get intuit to actually open a trouble ticket with regard to this issue. When i call the help desk they said they can not open a ticket because no error codes were available for the issue. so the saga continues. No trouble ticket, equals no resolution for the issue. and you have to reenter the data in turbotax. I checked the itsdeductable file on item descriptions that were long. changing the length of the titles did not help the issue. Its slightly confusing to see that someone was successful with the itsdeductable download by reinstalling windows OS.

[ppwaskie]

I never was able to open a ticket.  I honestly don't even know how to open an official ticket.  I couldn't find that option anywhere.  What I was able to do was open a "support" chat on the TurboTax Facebook business account.  That's where I chatted with various people, and we tried all sorts of bizarre things to zero success.

I'm completely mystified with who reinstalled Windows 11 and had things work.  That makes zero sense to me (I'm an OS developer).  I did try my imports on multiple computers and multiple OS's (Windows and MacOS).  Never worked.  My speculation of line length is just that, speculation.  I just entered things in manually again, which completely sucked, but I didn't see this getting resolved.  And I'm not going to be the validation department for a product I spent money on.

[mikem1024]

As an isolation test, I went back to TT2023 and deleted the deductions. Then invoked ItsDeductible Import.

The Import for 2023 worked. Because it worked for 2023, the problem for 2024 is NOT caused by WindowsOS. The Import failure with TT2024 desktop is with the 2024 TT software and how it doesn't work with ItsDeductible Online.

[seansrs968]

Really sucks how this does not work this year. Weird how some are able to get to work while others cannot. I do not know why I cannot get it to work right. 

[CatinaT1]

Our tech team is currently looking into this. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.

@ppwaskie @tucsonbill @quatreandjo 

[CatinaT1 · Accepted solution]

TurboTax is working to improve the process, but in the meantime, please only use alphabet letters and spaces in your ItsDeductible descriptions. Removing any special characters, including quotes, apostrophes, etc. will allow for a successful import.

@mikem1024 @ppwaskie @tucsonbill @quatreandjo @seansrs968 

[ppwaskie]

I hope that does work for others. Part of the troubleshooting I did with TurboTax support was exactly that. I went through every line item I added as a custom item, and removed any characters that weren't a letter or number. The only items that had things like / or - in them were ItsDeductible items already in the database. Still wouldn't import.

The most frustrating part of this is there would be no error message at all. I'm a software engineer, and can usually figure stuff out from any indicator why an operation like import this data failed. But this would silently fail and return to the Deductions screen in TurboTax. So this led myself and TurboTax support to just keep trying random things, hoping it'd resolve. 

I've long since manually re-entered everything into TurboTax and filed. I wasn't going to keep troubleshooting with support after 4 weeks of trying things.

If you're taking any input or feedback to this product for next year, please make the ItsDeductible Online inputs use whatever input parameters that you'd enforce within TurboTax itself. i.e. Don't let me put an entry into ItsDeductible that you wouldn't let me put into TurboTax. And also if you could actually display errors or warnings why an operation like the import failed, that would be immensely useful. 

[CatinaT1]

Thank you for your feedback. I have passed it on.

[mikem1024]

I fully agree with ppwaskie feedback. I will add that it would be helpful to have TechSupport people participate or at least regularly listening in on the Community. Not everything here is a tax question and finding access to  Techsupport is well hidden.

I also gave up on this earlier this week and filed.

I did a few minutes ago, look through the ItsDeductible printouts I saved. I see punctuation characters in both Standard and Custom entries. So, to me, any punctuation characters used in Standard should also be allowed in Custom. I might this weekend go through my Custom entries and edit out punctuation and then run a test to see if it works. There is no way currently to edit out punctuation in Standard items. So hopefully it'll work after just editing Custom items.

One more thought. I sometimes copy and paste descriptions from other webpages. I suppose it is possible doing so also copies residual invisible HTML code into the Custom description.

[mikem1024]

I went into ItsDeductible to remove punctuation characters from Custom Items. Although I could edit the item's description, and I got a popup that said the change was successfully saved. It actually did not save the changes.

The description remained unchanged with punctuation characters still present.

Update: changing the Custom Item description results in a new duplicate custom item being added. The item you think you're modifying does not change. That one has to be deleted in another edit step.

[mikem1024]

Removing punctuation characters from custom items. It was time consuming and complicated because the EDIT of custom items creates a duplicate item with the new description. It does not replace the item that was originally entered. That said, the subsequent IMPORT into TT Desktop Premier 2024 DOES WORK.

[KristinaK]

@ppwaskie The issue may still be due to the presence of unallowed characters. Those characters may be in the description of the item, name, address, or city of the charitable organization. 

The recommendation is to delete the item with an unallowed character and create a new item. 

Here is an example of possible characters that may seem allowable but are not. 

[mikem1024]

Yup, those unique characters and punctuation are not allowed. Just Letters, Numbers and Spaces are acceptable.

[ppwaskie]

I appreciate the replies.  I can assure you I do know what special characters are.  I removed all of them from my custom items.  I removed commas, apostrophes, hyphens, etc. Only letters and numbers.   I said this in an earlier reply, but another thing I also ran into is I tried copying and pasting some of the items into ItsDeductible inside TurboTax. Some of the lines that were allowed in the online version were too long for the embedded version. I shortened them all, and still no import. So I manually entered everything again so I could file. This was after 4 weeks of troubleshooting with TurboTax support via their Facebook business portal. Never once was removing special characters suggested, I tried that myself.

I did check previous years, and those didn’t have an issue with special characters, just as a data point. 

[seansrs968]

Finally got it work.