TurboTax: what it is, what it files, what it costs, and how a ledger feeds it

8.1What TurboTax is

TurboTax is an interview. The taxpayer answers questions; the software fills the forms, checks them against the IRS business rules, and transmits them under Intuit’s own e-file authorisation with the taxpayer’s self-select PIN as signature. It has no ledger, no double entry, no chart of accounts: a Schedule C is typed in as totals, or imported as totals. That is the whole relationship to bookkeeping — a ledger produces the numbers, TurboTax arranges and sends them — and it is why the question for us is not “can SQL-Ledger replace TurboTax” but “can SQL-Ledger produce what TurboTax wants to be given”.

Three facts frame everything below. Intuit renamed the tiers in December 2025: Live Assisted is now Expert Assist, Live Full Service is Expert Full Service, and the unassisted product is Do It Yourself. The assisted tiers are now more than half of TurboTax revenue and growing at 37% a year while unit counts fall, which tells you where Intuit is steering. And the desktop product, the only TurboTax that files a business entity, is now download-only, Windows 11 or macOS 14 and later, and shrinking 7% a year.

8.2The consumer editions

Two things about the online product surprise a professional. First, there is no price list before you start: the fee is shown at the moment of filing, and Intuit’s own community forum carries complaints of a $99 quote becoming $129 by the time the return was ready. Second, “free” has a history. Intuit left the IRS Free File programme in 2021; the Federal Trade Commission ordered it in January 2024 to stop advertising “free” unless free for everyone, and the Fifth Circuit vacated that order in March 2026 on constitutional grounds rather than on the merits. The IRS’s own Direct File, the free government alternative, was shut down for the 2026 season; Intuit’s federal lobbying that year set a company record. None of this matters to how the software works; all of it matters to how a client feels about it.

aDesktop

A Basic desktop edition still appears on an old Intuit page at the 2024 price and on no current one; treat it as gone. Desktop is bought once and installs on up to five computers the buyer owns; retail bundles (Costco, Amazon) routinely undercut Intuit’s prices by a third. Audit Defense, delivered by the third-party firm TaxAudit, is $40 to $60 an edition; a desktop Live Tax Advice add-on is $60 and not offered for Business.

8.3The expert tiers

This is where Intuit competes with a human preparer, so read it as a competitor’s price list.

The experts are described as CPAs, Enrolled Agents and tax attorneys with an average of twelve years’ experience; the credential of the person assigned is shown at matching time, not before. Full Service Business explicitly excludes C corporations, trusts and estates, non-profits, and any return needing more than five states. So a US client with an S corporation and a modest return will be offered, by Intuit, a $639 assisted or a $1,549 done-for-you filing, plus the state. That is the number a Pakistani practice is pricing against.

8.4TurboTax Business, the entity product

The only TurboTax a taxpayer can use to prepare their own 1120, 1120-S, 1065 or 1041 is the $190 desktop program, and it runs only on Windows — Intuit’s words are “not available to do online or on a Mac”. It prepares returns for any number of businesses of any entity type under one licence, produces the K-1s as PDFs or by e-delivery, e-files five federal returns, and charges $55 per state download with a further e-file fee per state. It does not prepare a personal 1040; the owner installs Home & Business beside it. There is no online Do It Yourself product for any entity; online, an entity return means paying an expert (section 8.3), and online there is no Form 1120 at any price.

8.5How data gets in

• W-2s and 1099s import directly from about half a million employers, payroll providers and brokerages, or by photographing the form in the mobile app. This is the import path that works well, and it has nothing to do with a business’s books.
• Last year’s return transfers from a TurboTax, H&R Block or TaxAct PDF, about a hundred fields.
• QuickBooks Desktop (the 2022 to 2024 versions) imports into TurboTax Desktop on Windows through File → Import → From Accounting Software, “some of your info, but not all”.
• QuickBooks Online does not import into TurboTax at all. Intuit’s help page says to convert to QuickBooks Desktop first. Online and Solopreneur users are steered instead to QuickBooks Live Tax, a TurboTax-expert filing inside QuickBooks from $169 for Schedule C. The two halves of Intuit connect through an expert, not a file.
• TXF — Tax Exchange Format — is the one open way in for anyone else, and it works only in TurboTax Desktop, via File → Import → From TXF Files. Online does not accept it. The specification is version 042, unchanged since about 2012; Intuit’s own copy is gone from its site and it survives on a mirror that recommends moving to the FDX JSON standard, which TurboTax does not accept either.
• There is no public API. Intuit’s developer forum confirms it; the import partnerships for banks and payroll providers are by invitation.

8.6How it files

Intuit is the Authorized IRS e-file Provider; the taxpayer signs electronically with a five-digit self-select PIN or last year’s adjusted gross income, plus an IRS Identity Protection PIN if they have one. IRS Publication 1345 limits any one consumer software licence or e-mail address to five federal e-files, rejected attempts included; beyond that the return is printed and posted. Online accounts hold one return each. State e-file is $25 a return on desktop and inside the state price online. Payment is by card only — Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, no PayPal — and the card needs a US billing address; “Pay With My Refund” costs $40 and needs a US address too; refund advances up to $4,000 and early refunds are financing products layered on top. A foreign address on the 1040 itself is fine for federal e-file, though some states refuse it, and a refund needs a US bank account.

8.7Why a paid preparer may not use it

This section exists because every offshore bookkeeping firm is eventually asked, “can’t you just do it in my TurboTax?”

• The licence. The desktop end-user agreement, revised September 2025, says the software may not be used “to prepare tax returns, schedules or worksheets on a professional or commercial basis (e.g., for a preparer’s or other fee or consideration)” and that the buyer may not “allow any other person to use the Software”. Intuit’s page for accountants puts it in one sentence: TurboTax “is only licensed for personal use, and it is not compliant with IRS regulations for paid preparers”.
• The IRS. A return prepared for compensation must carry the preparer’s PTIN and signature in the paid-preparer block. TurboTax has no such block; every return it transmits is “self-prepared”. A paid preparer sending one has filed a false declaration. The professional products — ProSeries, Lacerte, ProConnect Tax — carry the block and require a PTIN and an EFIN, and the EFIN, as chapter 7 set out, requires a US-resident principal.
• The client’s credentials. Logging into the client’s account from Lahore breaches the licence even if the client asks. Intuit geo-blocks only sanctioned territories, so it would work; it is nonetheless the thing not to do.
• Non-residents. TurboTax does not prepare Form 1040-NR; it refers non-resident aliens to Sprintax. Irrelevant to US clients, relevant to any Pakistani individual with US income asking the same firm.

What is permitted is the model chapter 7 arrived at: the preparer supplies the figures, the client keys or imports them into their own TurboTax and signs; or the practice works through professional software with a US signing partner. Unpaid help to family within the five-return limit is fine, and is not a business.

8.8The 2026 product, and where it is going

• Intuit Assist is embedded throughout; the February 2026 release claims agentic AI that “automates data entry for 90% of standard tax forms”, some six hundred expert offices and twenty retail stores, and “start anywhere, finish anywhere” between the app, the web and an office. A partnership with OpenAI was announced the same season.
• The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is handled in the tax-year-2025 product: the tips and overtime deductions, the $6,000 senior deduction, the $40,000 SALT cap, all through the new Schedule 1-A, which the Free Edition accepts.
• ItsDeductible, the charitable-valuation tool, was discontinued in October 2025 with no replacement.
• The company cut 17% of its workforce effective July 2026, and guides TurboTax revenue up only 2 to 3% for the coming year — assisted filing up, everything else flat. Nothing has been announced for tax season 2027 beyond experts being available from 5 January; in particular, no online Form 1120.

8.9The competitors, for the client who asks

For a sole proprietor client who self-files, FreeTaxUSA does the whole Schedule C for the price of a state; for an S corporation on a Mac, TaxAct; for everyone else who wants the brand, TurboTax. None of them lets the offshore preparer do the work in their software either.

8.10What this means for SQL-Ledger

TurboTax cannot be integrated with, only fed. There is one open format, it works in one product, and that product is the one that files entities. So the enhancement is small and precise, and it sits on top of chapter 7’s form-line mapping.

1Export to TXF

On the Tax Summary report of chapter 7, a button: Export TXF. It writes the version-042 file for the chosen form and year from the form-line totals, with the reference numbers from the mirrored specification, the memo items keyed on the report, and the 4562 depreciation totals from the asset register where present. Tested against TurboTax Business and Home & Business on Windows each season, because the reference numbers occasionally shift. The client downloads it, imports it, and answers the interview around figures that are already right. It is the only hand-off to TurboTax that exists for anyone outside Intuit, and QuickBooks Online does not have it.

Touches: SL/RP.pm, one export routine, the form-line tables of chapter 7. Effort: small.

2Owner allocations

A table of owners with ownership percentage and the dates it applied, on the dataset; used by the Tax Summary to split 1120-S and 1065 figures into per-owner K-1 workpapers, and by the estimated-tax worksheet of chapter 7 item 3. Ten lines of schema, one screen.

Touches: SL/AM.pm defaults, SL/RP.pm, one schema upgrade. Effort: small.

3A Tax Summary in TaxAct and ProConnect column order

Because a third of the clients will not be on TurboTax Desktop. The same report exported as CSV in the layout the professional packages and TaxAct import, so the US signing partner opens it in ProConnect without re-keying. This is the “Prep for Taxes” hand-off that QuickBooks Online Accountant sells, done with a file.

Touches: SL/RP.pm. Effort: small.

8.11What we will not build

Anything that transmits, for the reasons in chapters 7 and here. A TurboTax “integration” beyond TXF, because there is none to build. And any attempt to have the practice operate inside a client’s TurboTax, which is the one thing this chapter is meant to stop.

8.12Glossary of acronyms

8.13Sources