Nickname for 1099-R entries (and other income sources)

[mex_man]

It would make my data entry much more straightforward if I were able to assign a nickname to my 1099 forms.  I have many coming from the same providers but for different accounts or taxpayers (my wife, as we file jointly).  Instead, I have to use the Payer name exactly as from the 1099 form, making the list of imported 1099s look all the same, and thus difficult to navigate.  Why can't TurboTax support a nickname field for income sources such as 1099s?

[JosephS1]

Just to be clear, are you asking to allow you to have a nickname field before import?  I do not believe a correct importation of data would be able to be accomplished if you are.  Perhaps you can accomplish that at the payer level if you have control of how your account shows up at the agency level such as Morgan Stanley or TD Ameritrade but I have not heard of any method myself.

You can always alter the Received From field in the 1099 areas to add perhaps a shortened version of your account number or your own method of identification for each particular 1099.  That obviously entails tailoring each 1099 manually but it would possibly accomplish what you desire on a year to year basis.

The Highlighted field can be altered to accommodate what you may want to do but the actual name of the Received from agency should be reflected in the name somewhat. 

@mex_man

[mex_man]

Thanks for the input.  Your suggestion is exactly what I'm looking for but I have no idea what version of TurboTax you get that screen from -- I see nothing like that.  In the TurboTax Deluxe version for 2022 the data entry for each 1099 has two fields for "Payer Name" but the instructions say to enter "the information exactly as it is shown on the 1099_R" (emphasis in original), so applying my own "nickname" is not possible. 

[JohnB5677 · Accepted solution]

I understand your concern about entering the "Payer's" name exactly as it is.  I don't disagree but you can add a nickname to the end of it.  If your payer's name was XYZ, and you added 401K UPS, it would show XYZ 401K UPS.

You would also see it on the summary page.

and also on the Review Page.

The IRS uses the payer's TIN to identify them.

[skattenmin]

The level of stupidity in the software design here is just astounding. A paper 1099-DIV/INT/B/R(etc) form always contains an owner account number, and if there are multiple accounts at one institution, each 1099  has the appropriate account number.

Now, when it comes to electronic imports of 1099, the account numbers should always be imported and made part of a nickname that should be displayed (at least the last 4 digits if not the whole thing).  And NO, it is NOT a security problem, because other forms such as irs-8938 already have completely explicit account numbers in the forms!! "Security" is NOT an excuse.

It is just boneheaded to have multiple 1099 worksheets with the same name and no way to tell which account it came from.

To add insult to injury, I had good informative account names in turbotax 2021, and the names/worksheets even got imported into turbotax 2022, but then when importing 1099 from the banks and brokers, a whole new set of 1099 worksheets get created, and all the 1099 worksheets  from the same institution get the SAME name. For example

VANGUARD MARKETING CORPORATION VANGUARD BROKERAGE

VANGUARD MARKETING CORPORATION VANGUARD BROKERAGE

In the 2021 turbotax file I had named these

Vanguard-broker-MMMM

Vanguard-margin-NNNN

but these pre-existing names just got ignored and the meaningless (non-unique)  new names got generated.

Not only that, but the 2021-based worksheets then all get flagged as errant because they have no meaningful data in them!

UPSHOT: I should not have to dig through 1099 pdf files to find out which worksheet matches which account, and manually rename each of the workssheets every darn year!! Importation is supposed to save work. You need to make this work properly.

[Critter-3]

In my professional program (since the payer name does NOT have to match exactly)  I simply add the last 4 numbers of the account number to the payer's name.