Import stock sales from Microsoft Money into TurboTax Online

TurboTax Online's investment sale (stock, mutual fund, etc sales for capital gains) entry screen is a nice example of braindead design. Although the application provides a "bulk-entry spreadsheet-like interface", there's no import function available. So despite having all of my data in a nice spreadsheet (exported from the MS Money capital gains report) I was still faced with the prospect of manually entering each field from dozens of transactions. Worse still, the interface limits your access to seven rows/transactions per page.

Applescript to the rescue! It's an ugly solution, but it saved me a ton of time and helped avoid any manual entry typos:

1. Use your spreadsheet program to arrange your transaction data into columns matching those in TurboTax's interface. You should have five columns. Insure that the dates are formatted as mm/dd/yy
2. Copy and paste the data into your favorite text editor as tab-delimited text (I used the excellent TextMate)
3. Use search and replace to convert all the tabs into

   " & tab & "

4. Use search and replace to insert the following at the beginning of every line

   keystroke "

5. Use search and replace to insert the following at the end of every line

   " & tab

6. Now each line should look something like this

   keystroke "ACME Stock" & tab & "11/10/08" & tab & "100.12" & tab & "1/12/05" & tab & "584.12" & tab

7. Paste the following script into the Script Editor application on your Mac

   tell application "System Events"        tell process "Firefox"--Clearly replace Firefox above if you are using a different browser                set frontmost to true--Transactions go here        end tellend tell

8. Cut 7 lines at a time from your text editor, paste them into the Script Editor and click "Run"
9. The script will populate the TurboTax screen with your data. Click "Add more Rows" in TurboTax and repeat!

You're welcome.