TurboTax Deluxe not showing running refund/owe information

[doingtaxessuck]

after painfully and blindly putting all my info in and not having any clue due to the lack of the live tracker i'm going over to H&R block to see if it's better.  so sad, been doing my taxes for many many many years with turbotax, guess that comes to an end this year.

[dublinfiona]

Why? Plus the new format is harder to use especially since it only guides you to what it thinks you need. The old way took longer to use but allowed the user to go through all possibilities.  Looks like the broke something that was working. I'm not comfortable just blindly entering information without seeing thing as they progress. I'll probably look for an alternative.

[doingtaxessuck]

wow well within 10 minutes i setup H&r block account, they imported my PDF from Turbotax last year, and guess what, they have a live tracker!  

sorry turbtax, you really screwed the pooch on this one.  ok i'm done with this chat and turbotax.

[bshrock]

Taking the running Refund Monitor feature away is a glaring negative change... adds a reason to consider competitor products. The feature was very useful in showing exactly what/when affected the taxes. (That's how I discovered one year the nasty "Net Investment Income Tax".  I wondered why I was being charged nearly 19% for my long term capital gains. The TurboTax expert I contacted spent about 30 minutes on it, including consulted others, then gave up, but I eventually found the answer on the Community responses.)

Please put the Refund Monitor back!

[bshrock]

I may have discovered - the hard way - why TurboTax removed the Monitor: because it was lying to people!  I had an investment deduction concern (O&G) for 2023 that needed resolved because it would cost a lot to file an amended return later, so I entered all income, but not all deductions.

TurboTax Monitor indicated a ~$7k refund, so I filed an extension.  (IRS doesn't care if you ever finish if they owe you money - they just keep it after 3 years.) Finally went back to finish up... added more deductions and the refund increased. Then hit Review. Turbotax now told me to copy a value that I'd already given it from one line to another in a K1. It had all the information, why couldn't it have done that?!? 

Suddenly the Monitor switched from ~$7k refund to ~$25k owed!!!  I was in shock. I removed the number from the new line - no change!  Curious and desperate, I tried deleting that K1. Monitor changed to owing over $1k!! TurboTax 2023 Monitor was NOT accurate, and it really screwed me over! Now, because I trusted that Monitor value, I'm looking at a big bill and interest and penalties when I thought I was fine! HORRIBLE! :( :( :(

[taxlady28]

I am so sorry that happened to you.   You are absolutely correct.  The refund tracker is only correct after all income, expenses, and deductions are entered.  Experiences like this are the reason it is no longer available until all needed data is entered.

[MajorHavoc]

Anyone who has used TurboTax knows that the running refund/owe is not accurate until everything is entered. I’m mean seriously, how could it be?  But it is a useful tool if you understand that. When adding an income, you can see hit it effects your current balance. When adding a deduction, again you can see how it changes the value. 

Im sorry for your issue, but if you used that number to pay (or not pay) an amount for your extension and had not entered enough info (you do not have to enter everything, but enough to get a close number) to get a reasonable value, that is not the fault of the program. But rather a misunderstanding of how the program has worked for decades. However, given the complexity of your situation, I would recommend a licensed tax person to help calculate the amount to send with an extension. 

As someone who has done taxes for decades, having it is a useful tool when explaining how income or deductions change the balance. 

[bshrock]

Thank you for expressing sympathy regarding how badly I got burned by TurboTax (costing me thousands). 

However, I HAD entered ALL income, expenses, and deductions and it STILL showed a refund. Upon final review TurboTax wanted me to re-enter in a different place a number I had already given it... not until the review did TurboTax hammer with what it had hidden from me and failed to properly calculate until then! 

When I was charged ~19% for long term capital gains and called a TurboTax "expert" with 10+ years experience, she spent 30+ minutes, including consulting others, and finally told me it was after hours and I'd need to call back.  I spent another 5 minutes scouring the internet and discovered the nasty Net Investment Income Tax that adds 3.8% punishment for doing well with long term investments (two apartment syndicate investments sold in December, so I got burned for that).  Probably I should have ditched TurboTax then and used a professional instead, but I'm definitely done with it now, and will be telling this story to lots of people. I have lost all trust in TurboTax.

As both a consumer and a software engineer, I know it's not hard to keep the Monitor but add a text line that says it isn't guaranteed to be accurate without review.  I also know how easy it is to make programming mistakes, but TurboTax should have copied that one entry that caused all this trouble to where it belonged and calculated correctly when I entered it - but it didn't!  

[MajorHavoc]

**bleep**! That is awful. Is TT willing to pay penalties? They do have this (sort of) guarantee that if their software makes a mistake, the pay the difference.

I am also a software engineer, and yes, errors happen, but that one is really unacceptable. I have never stumbled into the Net Investment Income Tax, so I have to go look that up. So far, it has not been flagged on any of my investments. 

I'd be curious to know where you go after TT. I tried H&R Block software, but it was definitely not easy to use and I felt it was not as well designed. But I have lost a lot of faith in Intuit. I was thrilled when they sold off Quicken, especially for me as a Mac user, because they just left that software go to over 9 years out of date without updates. The new company is doing an excellent job with the program and I am happy to pay a yearly fee for such great software. 

Maybe we can convince Quicken to start doing tax software!😀

Good luck. That really suck as to that error.    

[mesquitebean]

---

@ MajorHavoc wrote:

. I have never stumbled into the Net Investment Income Tax, so I have to go look that up. So far, it has not been flagged on any of my investments. 

---

The NIIT has been around since 2013 and is a consequence of the Affordable Care Act.   One is subject to it when the "modified adjusted gross income" (as defined for NIIT purposes) exceeds a threshold of (as examples) $200,000 for single/ $250,000 for married filing jointly.   Unfortunately, like many things enacted in DC, those thresholds were not indexed for inflation. 

https://www.irs.gov/individuals/net-investment-income-tax

[Szfulmer]

I did the review and I'm on desktop, and the original refund amount from the first data input has not changed at all despite all kinds ìof data entry and using a laptop. Not when after days review

[Szfulmer]

I agree, they do not

[bshrock]

@MajorHavoc : Yes, definitely awful experience. I will attempt to get the interest and penalties covered,  and likely report the results, but first I need to recreate the issue and that will have to wait until I get all my current taxes/issues sorted. 

As to where I'm going after TurboTax, I found a CPA who's not only a tax preparer but a tax advisor and I think I can trust to handle my returns - they include real estate, oil and gas, stocks, options, and even "straddles".  I've had things in the past that if I hadn't known about TurboTax wouldn't have told me and that would have cost me a lot because I would have missed deductions, etc. (The NIIT was something I didn't know about that cost me, but there was nothing could be done about that one. ) With all the complication, who knows how much I've missed that I didn't know.  (Though I bet I still know things a lot of tax preparers don't) Plus spending entire weekends just doing taxes?  It's past time for me to finds someone else to handle my tax headaches, not just because TT screwed me this time. 

To leave this on a positive note, I have really liked that TurboTax provided the  ability for electronic document transfer, e.g. automatically download W2s, 1099s from brokerages, etc.  Years ago I had left TT and went to TaxAct, but came back and stayed with TT because of that transfer ability.

[bshrock]

@Szfulmer :  I'm glad you didn't have any trouble. I wouldn't wish my issue on anyone else.  However, if someone else's works, that isn't necessarily comparing "apples to apples" and doesn't negate my issue.  That would be like saying "I also drive a Ford, and nothing went wrong with my car."  What model was it? What year was it?  Was it gas, diesel, or electric? etc.

For anyone who wants more detail:

My issue was specifically on a 2023 tax return. 

- Prior to 4/15/2024, that return was started online where all income data entered, and most but not all deductions were entered.  It showed a sizable refund. (My first post referred to that situation - income complete, but not deductions. That's why I filed the extension without paying anything - expecting that I was getting a refund, not owing something. )

- The remaining deductions were entered this month (March 2025), on a desktop version.  The online version can no longer be used. To continue working on a 2023 return requires installing the desktop version, downloading the online return (which is exactly as it was last year and can no longer be changed), and importing that into the desktop.

- As one would expect, adding the remaining deductions increased the refund shown.

Thus, the online version showed a refund with all income entered but not all deductions, and the desktop version showed a bigger refund once the remaining deductions were entered.

- The Refund Monitor issue (a ~$30k+ swing going from a nice ~$7k refund to owing  ~$25k ) occurred specifically with a positive value entered on a K1 (I believe Part III Box 11) that TurboTax failed to propagate until review. 

(I hadn't previously completed the review last year because 1) I hadn't finished entering deductions, and 2) I have somewhat complicated returns with multiple K1s. TurboTax has in the past always flagged things in the K1s that made no difference to the total tax, and I hadn't sorted through all those in this case.   

There's a saying in the software world - "You can't make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious!"  It's always been on the users to know that the Refund Monitor wouldn't be accurate until all income and deductions were entered, though people apparently are dim enough to much worse things (hence all the crazy legal disclaimers). People haven't changed in decades, so why did TurboTax suddenly this year decide that the Monitor needed to go even though it would rile their customers?  My guess is that there were plenty of situations like mine that made it a liability worse than losing customers.

[MJM2022]

I've been using turbotax for over a decade and removing this feature is horrendous.  this will be the last year i use turbotax