DISCLAIMER: I AM NOT A TAX PROFESSIONAL. THIS IS SIMPLY A TAX TIP FROM SOMEONE WHO IS EXHAUSTED FROM DOING THEIR OWN PERSONAL TAXES AND IS LOOKING FOR A BREAK OF ANY KIND.
I use TurboTax and a few years ago I received along with my tax software another software called ItsDeductible. ItsDeductible allowed me to enter in all the items we had donated to charity and it assigned a value to it and to be honest, the value it assigns is higher than I was using (by what I considered a significant amount). Yeah - love it when that happens! This year I didn't receive the software and was a bit bummed. After doing a little bit of research I quickly discovered that they have eliminated the desktop software and moved everything online - you can check it out here. Now, I thought I was special because it was free for me but it appears, according to their website that this is free to all!
To use it you simply logged in with your account information (and if you don't have an account you can set one up for free) and then click on the ItsDeductible link. At this point you must decide if you are going to work on 2007 (review previous data), 2008 or 2009 data. I chose 2008 since that's what I'm working on right now. I simply pulled out my receipts and notes and was able to enter what we had donated fairly fast. It's a simple point and click type of set-up which makes it really nice. When I was done with 2008 I decided to go ahead and enter the 2009 donations we've already made (we make a lot of donations, I get so tired of stuff lying around!).
Here's a picture of the donation page:
If you have set-up an account, your data is saved when you exit. This is nice because you can access the data throughout the year. I went ahead and created a shortcut on my toolbar to this page so I can update it after each trip to our local Goodwill.
Now here's the bonus beauty of this little tool. Since I use TurboTax I was able to download all the data in just a few steps. I was prompted to enter my username and password for my account and then I clicked the Import Now button. Viola, it was in Turbo Tax in a matter of seconds. A lot of data entered with very little effort on my part. Now that's what I'm talking about!
Now, if I could only get this automated with all other aspects of my taxes. One of my New Years Resolutions should have been to actually use Quicken! Is it too late?
P.S. I believe you can use ItsDeductible without establishing an account. The data just wouldn't be saved for future use.
