Obviously, the design & beta-testing of medical expenses is a young person's job, as the process for entering over 50 line items is painfully ponderous for a retired IT Director!
ENTRY:
Medical Expenses can come from a date-sorted list from Quicken/MS Excel, or an unsorted pile of receipts. In either case, one has to manually entry three numbers every single time (dd/mm/yyyy). Given CRA rules, the year can only be the current tax year, or the previous tax year. Therefore offer us a drop-down for the years! Also, this prevents year typo's (2107 for 2017), and entries of the current year, 2018 in error.
Medical expenses can be for tfiler, "spouse" or dependants. I've entered those details above, so don't ask me to enter the name of the patient for every receipt. Give me a drop-down of the possible patients, based on previously entered persons.
Quicken "remembers" prior entries, and a sick person probably has primary care providers they routinely use - I had nine (9). But I entered my pharmacy name a dozen times, my clinic's name in full 27 times, only to have it truncated on the MEDICAL form!
Ditto for the DESCRIPTION OF EXPENSES. I typed Physiotherapy in full 20 times, and Prescription a dozen times
REVIEW & PRINTING
The screen showing data entered so far presents DESCRIPTION and AMOUNT PAID. Given that the description for 20 items was Physiotherapy, and my entry process was repeatedly interrupted, I needed to go in and out of the summary screen, and open each entry until I found the last one entered, and then continued to enter receipts until the next interruption!
PLEASE make the Summary list emulate the MEDICAL form, WITH THE OPTIONS to sort on each column so that one can sort by date, Patient, Provider, Description, and even by amount to confirm all entries have been made. Then transfer that sorted data to the MEDICALform.
OPTIMISING
I tried to use the OPTIMIZE button, but it only worked for the dates depicted in the selection boxes. Eventually, I used the slider to go to the first date, and advanced day-by-day until I found the sweet spot in my refund. This was over $100 CAD greater than the OPTIMIZE button came up with, with six weeks difference between your optimisation, and mine...
Having used TurboTax and its predecessors since 1991, this was the first time I needed to entry large numbers of receipts, and it was a dreadful painful & time-consuming process, taking up two-thirds of the total entry time. TurboTax, you can do better!
Thank you for your feedback.
Entering medical expenses can be a tedious process for sure. For similar expenses, consider entering the total rather than each individual expense. For example, total all prescription receipts and enter only the total amount - with the description "prescriptions" and the date as the latest date of the year on your receipts.
Or, if you'd rather, total the entire amount of your medical expenses as a single entry. Total all of your medical expenses (prescriptions, physiotherapy, etc) and enter the total as one entry. Then, do the same for your spouse.
Need to enter more than 50 medical expenses but the medical worksheet only lists 50!!!!!!! HOw do I print out all the extra receipts?
@malcolmfpalmer1 As Jennifer suggested above, you can either enter all the medical receipts in one total, or group similar ones together if possible.