It was unclear that I COULD NOT directly export QBO data into Turbo Tax as a C-Corp. I went through the effort of downloading a trial verison of QB Desktop to import data from QBO but it requires a Company file that does not export directly from QBO. There is no clear way of exporting / importing from within the suite of applications to make the Tax filing easy for C-Corporations. This was a very painful process. Further the Turbo Tax application was unable to print because the PDF driver failed. I found a work around by preview printing the forms. Painful. This is 3 stars vs 0 stars, because after tedious manual entry, the system guided me through the process and eventually completed the task.
I have been using TurboTax online for years with great success, and for personal taxes or a pass-through entity, it works great. This year I needed to file a C-Corp tax return. TurboTax Online does not handle C-Corp returns, so I opted to download the Desktop version - TurboTax Business 2024.
For starters, you can not directly import QuickBooks information from Quickbooks Online into the desktop version of TurboTax Business. You have to have QuickBooks desktop software installed on your computer, because TurboTax Desktop automatically looks for a Quickbooks Desktop file (.QBW), and doesn't give you the option to browse for a file manually. There is a migration tool that lets you convert a downloaded .QBXML file from QuickBooks Online, and import it into the QuickBooks Desktop software (if you even have the desktop version, and have an active subscription to it), which you can then finish setting up your company in the QB Desktop version, and then if all went well, you can hopefully import it into TurboTax Desktop. Unfortunately, I only have Quickbooks Online and NO subscription to Quickbooks Desktop. I was able to download a 30-day TRIAL version of Quickbooks Enterprise (Desktop), but unfortunately, it doesn't play very nice with the migration tool.
After 2 solid days of trying to get the migration tool to complete a migration without any errors into the trial desktop version, I was finally able to verify my data in the desktop version, and then import it into TurboTax desktop, which also didn't go smooth the first couple of tries. The trial version would often times close by itself or give some kind of error preventing TurboTax from completing the import. Apparently both programs have to be running for the import to take place, TurboTax desktop doesn't seem to be equipped to import a QB desktop file by itself.
This would probably go a lot smoother if Intuit gave TurboTax Desktop version the ability to import directly from Quickbooks Online, or at least be able to import data using the QBXML file that is downloaded from Quickbooks Online. The whole idea of having to use the Quickbooks Desktop software as a middle-man for importing into TurboTax Desktop is poor design, or a terrible oversight, in my opinion. Better yet, Intuit could just outfit Turbotax Online to handle C-Corp returns and import directly from Quickbooks Online, and do away with all of this software requirement craziness. Wish I could give 5 stars, but this whole C-Corp process with Turbotax has been a nightmare, and I came very close to opting for a different solution.
Aside from all of the absolute insanity with importing the Quickbooks data, the software by itself performed pretty well, but next year, if nothing has changed, I'll have to find a new solution. I'm not buying QB Desktop software (in addition to QBO) just for the ability to import my data into TurboTax Desktop software.
The return was rejected three times. Even after the error check came back with no known errors. But in fact there were some dates that were mis-aligned and should have been easily caught during the error check. It took more human review and cross-checking to find what ended up being two dates that needed to be redone.