How to get TurboTax 2023 Desktop to calculate Schedule D line 1a and 8a

[Janelli]

I imported hundreds of brokerage transactions into TurboTax 2023 Premier Desktop directly from my financial firms. TurboTax is currently listing every single brokerage transaction from my 1099-Bs on Form 8949 and leaving Schedule D line 1a and line 8a blank. How do I get TurboTax to summarize the transactions and report the totals on Schedule D line 1a and line 8a when the cost basis has been reported to the IRS and the transactions do not need to be listed separately? In TurboTax 2022 there was a radiobutton or something that you could use to say that you wanted to group the transaction, but I can't find the equivalent functionality in TurboTax 2023. In the past I couldn't file state taxes electronically if there were more than a limited number of transactions, so I needed to manually group them in TurboTax.

[rjs · Accepted solution]

I don't see any entirely satisfactory solution for you.

On the Capital Asset Sales Worksheet, on the first line of each entry, to the right of the description, there is a line that says "Check here if this summarizes multiple sales" and there is a check box to the right of that. When you check that box, the sale will be removed from Form 8949 and added to Schedule D line 1a or 8a as appropriate. But if you have hundreds of sales, going through the worksheets and checking that box for every sale might not be practical.

Perhaps a better approach would be to not import the transactions, or delete the ones you have already imported, and make summary entries manually. When you start to enter sales from a particular brokerage, one of the screens asks you how you want to enter the sales. It gives you a choice of "Sales section totals" or "One by one." If you select "Sales section totals," you just enter the total proceeds and basis from your brokerage statement for each sales section. The ones for which you select "basis reported to IRS" will be added to Schedule D line 1a or 8a and will not be listed on Form 8949.

[Janelli]

Thanks for the help! I was able to find the Capital Asset Sales worksheets and checkboxes that you mentioned to get the result that I wanted. It wasn't too painful since there is one worksheet per brokerage account, but not very user friendly.

[fanfare]

For a long time TurboTax did not support Line 1a and 8a.

A couple of years ago, TurboTax changed the processing of Form 8949 in an undocumented way.

TurboTax takes advantage of "Detail Reporting Exception" rule and silently suppresses some line items in Box A or Box D category.

Based on prior forum complaints about this. it's not clear exactly what rule it is using, and there is no way to force TurboTax to list all transaction details on Form 8949, as allowed by IRS.

Processing in latest version of TurboTax may be different.

You want to use the "Detail Reporting Exception"

If you got your desired result in a straight-forward manner,

you should post the solution.

@Janelli