How to indicate that one is self-employed?

[Cowxie]

HI all,

Doing the 2023 for my spouse (who is self-employed) and I (retired and not working), and on my T1 form I'm asked to 'tick this box if they were self-employed in 2023'.  Simply stated, TurboTax will not allow me to do so, as I get the 'you have tried to change the value of a calculated field' error message.

This leads me to a suggestion and a question:

-suggest that the software creators provide a more specific, and helpful, error message indicating where this calculated field comes from.  Like 'please see the INFOWS page (or whatever page or field is appropriate) to update this value"

-where can I update this value such that this self-employed box on my T1 is in fact correctly showing that my spouse is indeed self-employed?

Thanks for considering and I look forward to reading feedback on the above.

Cheers

/paul

[Cowxie · Accepted solution]

Update:

With the assistance of the TurboTax telephone support, and a level 2 support individual, we learned that the check box on the T1 form indicating self-employment requires two things:

-there must be non-zero values on at least one of the two T2125 forms.  That is, a non-zero value for fees or sales, and/or a non-zero value for expenses. 

-In addition, there is a radio button in the Easy Step questionaire asking whether one has been self-employed. 

Both of these must be true for the self-employment check box to be 'checked'.

Feedback was left with telephone support that improving the override error messaging to include more details would be very helpful to users.  In this case, a simple explanation stating that the self-employment check box gets checked when T2125 form is appropriately completed along with noting in the Easy Step that the user is self-employed would have solved this problem.

Hope that what we've all learned here today helps others out.

Cheers,

/paul

[TurboTaxBrenda]

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