Schedule D

[JON]

My first one of the year. $10,000,000 in sales and purchases-actually has about a $35,000 loss. I asked him to ask Schwab for a Excel report. Just take a guess how long it would take to input this puppy. If the only downside is a $100 penalty to me for recording Schwab on one line I will take that in a minute. The Schwab statement is 65 pages 41 of them list the sales and 18 of them list the buys I have a list of the sales purchased in 2004 6 items and the buys still held at 1/1/05 9 items. The office procedure will have to set today, maybe. Their is a page and half of option trading...

I know a bunch who are not going to change their reporting. Know I have to decide if I will change mine.

[Gene V]

Sch. D

I usually just combine the sales into short term and long term and just list two to three items, never had any problem, but this year I decided I would list all of the sales from one of my clients statement, there where 172 sales, it took me just over 2 hours to input the 172 sales.
They were all summarize on Smith Barney year end statement, which was in Sch. D format, so I just could of attached the summary to form 8453, which I will do next year. The client mail the broker information to me ahead of there appointment, so I had plenty of time to input the information.

[Matt Sova]

Schedule D

I would report the short term on one line and the long term on one line with "Various" as the dates purchased and sold.

Matt

[jainen]

The real downside

>>the only downside is a $100 penalty<<

The real downside is that you are preparing an incomplete return, which is how the IRS has said they may treat it. They'll probably be tolerant this year and only make a few taxpayers examples, but their position is that this requirement is not even a little bit new. I'm sure their real purpose is to pressure the brokers to improve reporting, which is something tax practitioners can certainly support.

Meanwhile, if the client gets hassled by the IRS he will be mad at YOU, and rightly so because you didn't follow plain and simple instructions.

I really don't see what the fuss is about. You have until October 15 to file.

[Nancy]

Data input

I have been having fairly good luck with scanning the brokerage statement into an Excel file and then importing the Excel file into my software. It doesn't work very well if I have a faxed copy of the brokerage statement, but if I have the original document, the OCR (optical character recognition) software does an excellent job of recognizing the information on the brokerage statement.

Most scanners come with OCR software. I don't know if most tax software products allow the import of Excel spreadsheets, but some of them do.

It is a two-step process and takes some time, but may be faster than keying the data into the tax software for clients with extensive brokerage statements.

[JON]

Excel

The Scwab is just lists of sales and then lists of purchases. There is no matching done on their end. Wachovia will give Excel and I think Schwab and others with a premium or whatever designation will give Excel which is nice-especially with your Ultra Tax. Just thinking if I want to go upstream on this one and have my local Congressman with me if further information is requested...