Approximately what date will Bivio have the tax forms for 2003 ready to go??

Philip Hayman writes:
> Approximately what date will Bivio have the tax forms for 2003 ready to go??

The tax interview, which is more complex due to the recent changes in
qualify dividends, will be released on Monday (1/12). The official
IRS "fill-in" tax forms were just released this week, and we're
integrating them into the system. We should have these ready by the
following Monday (1/19).

Please note that you should not file your returns until you have
audited your books against any 1099s your club may receive from
brokers, mutual funds, etc.

This year is particularly important, because mutual fund dividends are
both qualified and unqualified. They only report what is qualified
and unqualified on the 1099. This is true in any year with long/short
capital gains on distributions, however, it's much worse this year.
You'll notice serveral more boxes on the 1099s you receive.

If you'd like to read about the rules, go to:

http://personal.fidelity.com/planning/tax/distributions/qualified.shtml#howto

We had to program this correctly. It's non-trivial. Indeed even our
geniuses in Washington failed to get the laws quite right. To learn
about the "dividend law bug", read this article:

http://www.fairmark.com/news/divglitch.htm

We have taken extra care to avoid problems, which is why our tax
interview is a bit delayed this year. We give you as much data as
possible, such as automatically defaulting the ex-dividend date and
the qualification status (qualified, qualified preferred, or
unqualified) of your investments which yield dividends, and we show
you the information on summary pages during the tax interview. If we
didn't you might pay too much in taxes, and we wouldn't want that to
happen!

Cheers,
Rob

> ... and we show you the information on
> summary pages during the tax interview.

Does that mean we'll see an itemized breakdown of each
individual dividend and whether bivio treated it as
qualified or non-qualified? If not, I'd like to request
that you provide such a report.

BTW ... shouldn't the Member Tax Allocations report
distinguish between qualified and non-qualified dividends?

-Jim Thomas

Jim Thomas writes:
> Does that mean we'll see an itemized breakdown of each
> individual dividend and whether bivio treated it as
> qualified or non-qualified? If not, I'd like to request
> that you provide such a report.

Yes, unfortunately. Each dividend has an ex-dividend date, which we
pre-populate with values from our database. If we have all your
stocks in our database, you'll probably just have to click "ok".
You'll also be asked in a separate table whether the investments are
qualified, qualified preferred, or not qualified. Again, we
pre-populate our best guess in this table from our database, and
you'll probably just have to click ok. This all happens during the
tax interview, or, in addition, you can click on info (new!) next to
your investments and edit your individual dividends.

> BTW ... shouldn't the Member Tax Allocations report
> distinguish between qualified and non-qualified dividends?

I assume so, but I'll have to get back to you on this. One of the
reasons we introduced the qualified dividend changes in two parts was
that it is really complicated, and we wanted to get your feedback as
early as possible on issues like this before clubs could print their
returns. This year's changes are quite complicated, and although we
did our best to ensure the quality of our software, there may still be
problems. If you find any issues like this, please send them to
support@bivio.com or email this forum (and, yes, Juan, we've been
looking into the issues you raised ;-).

Thanks again for your feedback.

And, I'd also like to thank all those bivio users who contribute to
this forum. It's nice to see people helping each other.

Cheers,
Rob

Jim Thomas wrote:
> Does that mean we'll see an itemized breakdown of each
> individual dividend and whether bivio treated it as
> qualified or non-qualified?
 
After you take the tax interview, both the Income Statement and the
Member Tax Allocation reports will show the qualified and
non-qualified dividends.
 
The tax interview is available now for the club administrator or
treasurer. Select the Accounting / Taxes menu and then take the
'Proceed to the interview' link. The tax interview can be taken
multiple times.
 
Paul Moeller
bivio, Inc.

> After you take the tax interview, both the
> Income Statement and the Member Tax
> Allocation reports will show the qualified
> and non-qualified dividends.

I notice that dividends are also identified as
Qualified-Dividends or just Dividends (i.e., not qualified)
in the Transaction Ledger, Transaction History and, best of
all, in the transactions detail for each individual security
(linked to from Accounting -> Investments). Great job (not
that I expected anything less)!

The only problem I noticed is that the Transaction History
report has no column for Qualified Dividends, so the dollar
amount only appears for non-qualified dividends on that
report.

For one of our recently purchased stocks I tried changing
the ex-dividend date for one dividend to be the day after
the purchase date. Bivio properly changed just that one
dividend from qualified to non-qualified. I'm happy!

-Jim Thomas

Jim Thomas wrote:
> The only problem I noticed is that the Transaction History
> report has no column for Qualified Dividends, so the dollar
> amount only appears for non-qualified dividends on that
> report.
 
Thank you for pointing this out. We'll have Qualified Dividends
showing on the Transaction History report on Monday.
 
Paul Moeller
bivio, Inc.