It's tax season here in the U.S. The smell of W-2's, 1099's, Schedule D's and the ever-lovely delicate wafting scent of the 1040 is drifting through the air. Or is that a stench?
I have started my annual income report to Uncle Sugar, and I am one of the fortunate ones that actually has money, income, and yes, even investments. As part of the process of reporting income gains and losses realized from investments, I need to itemize each transaction that I participated in, so Uncle Sugar can tax the gains as either short term or long term - when gains were made.
Most investment institutions have made this a reasonably painless process in that they allow for a download of your transaction data to a txf file - a generic tax format file that can then be easily imported into (I think) any tax software package. Most. Not all. Not the one institution that has the majority of my taxable investments. I'm looking at you, Raymond James.
JFC, man, after dealing with your lame-ass download page, I am very close to dumping you for a different company, despite a friend being my broker. On the download page, there are exactly three options:
What's stupid about their decision to exclude a .txf download is that TurboTax will accommodate this file format along with the rest of the world. All they needed to do was make this file format available and ALL tax software packages would be accommodated. But instead, Raymond James went down the fractal boundary into specifics without ever doing the generic case first.
Completely and utterly stupid.
I have started my annual income report to Uncle Sugar, and I am one of the fortunate ones that actually has money, income, and yes, even investments. As part of the process of reporting income gains and losses realized from investments, I need to itemize each transaction that I participated in, so Uncle Sugar can tax the gains as either short term or long term - when gains were made.
Most investment institutions have made this a reasonably painless process in that they allow for a download of your transaction data to a txf file - a generic tax format file that can then be easily imported into (I think) any tax software package. Most. Not all. Not the one institution that has the majority of my taxable investments. I'm looking at you, Raymond James.
JFC, man, after dealing with your lame-ass download page, I am very close to dumping you for a different company, despite a friend being my broker. On the download page, there are exactly three options:
- Download the last 45 days worth of transactions to Quicken - Um, no thanks.
- Download the last 45 days to Microsoft Money - Sorry, don't use it.
- Instructions on how to import the information directly from inside TurboTax - wait, import from inside? ONLY??
What's stupid about their decision to exclude a .txf download is that TurboTax will accommodate this file format along with the rest of the world. All they needed to do was make this file format available and ALL tax software packages would be accommodated. But instead, Raymond James went down the fractal boundary into specifics without ever doing the generic case first.
Completely and utterly stupid.
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