It's tax season! Fun times... If your using QuickBooks and TurboTax for the first time all year, it can really cause a lot of headache's while you learn how to use the new software once again. I seem to go through this learning process ever tax season. This tax season was no different, as I came upon one issue while trying to use TurboTax Deluxe 2007 to import data from QuickBooks Pro 2008 on my Windows Vista machine. Here's the problem and what I did to solve it:
After opening TurboTax 2007 (by simply double clicking on the desktop icon) and starting my tax return, I got to the section where it asks you to import data from financial software like QuickBooks and Quicken.
In TurboTax, it asks you to "Choose a Program To Import From". I selected QuickBooks and clicked Continue.
I then opened QuickBooks 2008 (using "Run as Administrator") and the account file that I wanted to import into TurboTax. Keep in mind the only way I've been able to get QuickBooks 2008 to open on my Windows Vista box is to open it with "Run as Administrator". Essentially, I right click on the QuickBooks desktop icon and select "Run as Administrator". See Figure 1.
After that, in TurboTax I selected "Accrual" accounting and clicked the "Import Now" button. Unfortunately, after clicking "Import Now" I received a pop-up error saying "There is no current QuickBooks company file open. Please open QuickBooks and open a company file before trying to use QuickBooks Import." See Figure 2.
So to get around this issue, and successfully import my QuickBooks data into TurboTax, all I needed to do was run TurboTax 2007 as an Administator as well. To do this, I simply right clicked on the TurboTax icon on my desktop and selected "Run as Administrator". See Figure 3. After doing this, I was able to import my QuickBooks account file into TurboTax without any errors, because both QuickBooks and TurboTax were being run as administators.
UPDATE 3-15-2009: So I just started doing taxes for 2008, and ran into the same issue for the TurboTax Home and Business 2008 version. However, this time when I tried to select "Run as Administrator" from the TurboTax 2008 shortcut icon on my desktop, I was not able to find a menu for "Run as Administrator". So what I had to do, was go to the actual Turbotax application file located in the "Program Files" folder, right-click on Turbotax, and select "Run as Administrator". See Figure 4. On my computer, the Turbotax application file is in:
Local Disk (C:) > Program Files > TurboTax > Home & Business 2008 > 32bit > Turbotax
Once I did this, I was able to import my Quickbooks company file into Turbotax 2008.
Lastly, I just wanted to point out that if you need to import Quicken data, you also have first open Quicken with "Run as Administrator", or else you will get an error while trying to import data into TurboTax.
My two cents: I have to say I find it very BAD on the part of Intuit (the software makers of both Turbotax and Quickbooks) that they still have not corrected this import file problem for Vista. The typical user should not have to jump through so many hoops just to import data into their program.
