A colleague brought this thread to my attention recently, so I thought I'd hop on to share some of the reasons we decided to "fix what wasn't broken" 🙂
The investments area has been problematic for many users for many years for a variety of reasons. You may or may not have noticed there were actually THREE different entry points for investment sales (the table on the Schedule D for very simple sales, the Capital Gains (Losses) Detail Entry Worksheet for slightly more complex sales and imported sales, and finally the Capital Gain (Loss) Transaction Worksheet for the most complex sales). These three separate entry points were the source of endless user frustration and contacts to customer support. So the first problem we fixed was making a single point of entry for investment sales.
(As an aside on the name, calling it the Form 1099-B Worksheet is simply following the naming pattern that Proseries has used for decades. Income types that are *usually* reported on particular form -- interest on 1099-INT, dividends on 1099-DIV, etc -- get a worksheet named after the form where they're usually reported. Of course, tax pros know those types of income won't always be reported on the official IRS form, but for decades pros haven't seemed to have much trouble with the idea that interest goes on the 1099-INT worksheet -- even if not on an official IRS 1099-INT -- and so forth. So the naming decision was simply to follow what we generally do with worksheet names.)
The second big issue we wanted to address was difficulty with reconciling multiple accounts statements. Previously, all sales, even if from multiple accounts, went into a single table, making reconciliation quite difficult. You could get a proceeds summary by account, but only if you entered the name of the broker and/or account for each and every sale -- a real hassle if trying to enter multiple accounts with dozens (or hundreds or more) of sales each. The new design makes the entry worksheet multi-copy, so you can create a separate copy for each account, and automatically get a complete summary of basis, proceeds, and adjustments by 8949 category that should closely align with the statement clients get from brokers. This is tremendously valuable when dealing with clients that have a lot of trading activity. Unfortunately it also means we can't put the table on the Schedule D since there can only be one copy of that. But it's just two clicks of the mouse from Schedule D to create the new worksheet. Of course, if you're dealing with a client with only a few trades and you don't care about reconciling the statements, then throw all the sales on a single worksheet if you want to. It's a tremendously valuable tool in some situations, but you don't have to use it if that's not your client's situation.
Finally, with respect to what fields were included on the main worksheet vs what fields required clicking through to the new Adjustments worksheet, this was a straight-forward data driven decision. Clicking through to the supporting worksheet to enter a value takes somewhere in the rough ballpark of 50 times longer than simply tabbing through a field on the primary worksheet. So it logically follows that if a field is needed by significantly less than 2% of investment sales (i.e. 1 in 50), then it will be faster for pros if we move the field off the main entry worksheet (where they would always have tab through the empty field even though it rarely applies) to the supporting worksheet. So with corrected cost basis, for example, we found that about 0.5% of investment sales reported a corrected cost basis. So for every sale with corrected cost basis that now takes ~50 times longer than simply tabbing to the field on the worksheet, there are about 199 sales that can be entered a little bit faster because there's not an unnecessary field to tab through. The net result is pros should spend about 1/4 as much time, on average, in navigation connected to corrected cost basis (whether it's navigating to make an entry in this field on another worksheet, or tabbing through an unneeded field for the >99% of sales that don't need it). The lowest use fields that made it onto the primary worksheet were the adjustment amount and code fields, which are actually used just under 2% of the time. We decided to include them even though they're just under the 2% threshold because we think their use will become more common now that fewer adjustments are handled on the main entry table. The adjustment codes are all listed right below the entry table, and we suspect many pros will get comfortable with using these codes for some of the simple adjustments rather than navigating to the Adjustments worksheet. (e.g. putting a C in the adjustment code field is much quicker than navigating to the Adjustments worksheet) Unfortunately, while we would have liked to put all the codes in a simple dropdown, our current system doesn't provide a way for us to do a dropdown that supports multiple selections. (e.g. it's entirely possible to need to make a B and an O adjustment for the same sale, which wouldn't be possible with a dropdown)
Obviously it's tough to adapt when something changes that you're used to. And of course there will be some specific situations where the new approach does take a little more time. But I just wanted to give the background so you can see pretty much every concern raised here was already considered, and the decisions we made were driven entirely by data around what types of entries our pros actually need to make and how to make that as efficient as possible *on average*. For the overwhelming majority of your clients, we think you're going to find the new approach is significantly more straight-forward and efficient.
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