How to enter donations in TurboTax without ItsDeductible

For about twenty years the answer to this question was one click: TurboTax pulled your donations straight out of ItsDeductible. That path closed when the service shut down on October 21, 2025, and there is no replacement for it. Non-cash donations now get typed in.

That is more annoying than it is hard, and most of the difficulty is in preparation rather than in the software. This walks through where the screens are, what they ask for, what TurboTax can and cannot import, and how to arrive with the figures already in the right shape so the typing takes minutes instead of an evening.

Before you open TurboTax at all

Two questions worth settling first, because they can make the whole exercise unnecessary.

Are you itemizing?

Charitable contributions are generally deductible only if you itemize, which means your total itemized deductions have to exceed your standard deduction for the year. For a lot of households they do not, and hours spent valuing bags of clothing then produce no tax benefit at all. Publication 526 sets out the rules for what is deductible and to whom.

There is a separate and much newer wrinkle for people who do not itemize, beginning with tax year 2026. It is capped, it is for cash contributions only, and the guidance is still settling, so we have written it up carefully and hedged in the non-itemizer deduction guide rather than summarizing it in a sentence here.

Get the figures into one list first

TurboTax asks for donations grouped the way you actually made them: by organization, then by date. Reconstructing that inside the interview, one screen at a time, is where the evening goes. Build the list first, in whatever you like, with these columns:

• Organization name and address
• Date of the donation
• Whether it was cash or items
• For items: what the items were, in categories rather than one line per sock, and the total value for that drop-off
• For anything above $500: when you acquired it, how you acquired it, and what it cost you

That last row is not busywork. Form 8283 Section A asks for the date acquired, how it was acquired, and your cost or adjusted basis, and it is much easier to answer in your own notes than in a text field halfway through an interview. Our Form 8283 guide covers which items need it.

Where the donation screens are

As described in Intuit's support article on entering charitable donations, which was last updated in April 2026:

TurboTax Online

1. In the Federal section, open Deductions and credits.
2. Find Donations to charity.
3. Answer yes when asked whether you made donations to charity for the tax year.
4. Follow the screens, entering one organization at a time.

TurboTax Desktop

1. Open your return and go to Federal Taxes, then Deductions and credits.
2. Choose to pick what you work on if prompted.
3. Next to Charitable Donations, select Visit All.
4. Answer yes to the questions about making and entering donations for the year.
5. Work through the screen that enters donations one at a time, then finish on the review screen listing all your charities.

Screen names move between tax years. If yours differ, the search box inside TurboTax and the phrase "donations to charity" gets you there faster than hunting through menus.

The valuation tool that replaced ItsDeductible, and its limits

TurboTax Online has a fair market valuation tool inside the donations flow. Per Intuit's support article on it, last updated in March 2026, you reach it by entering the charity, checking the box for items, choosing the donation type and date, then selecting the link labeled "Help me value my donations." It gives two estimates per item, described as excellent or like-new condition and fair condition or used items, and it lets you group identical items donated to the same charity on the same date.

Intuit's own article states that this is a fair market value tool inside the charitable donations section, not a return of ItsDeductible. Take that at face value. It is a genuinely useful calculator, and it is missing four things the old product did:

What TurboTax can and cannot import

Worth being precise, because a lot of hope gets spent here.

• ItsDeductible CSV files: not supported, in either TurboTax Online or Desktop. There was never a file-based handoff between the two products, only a live account-to-account import that no longer has a service on the other end.
• TXF files: TurboTax Desktop only. Intuit's support article, updated January 2026, gives the path as File, then Import, then From Accounting Software on Windows or From TXF Files on Mac.
• TurboTax Online: no file import of any kind for donations. Everything is typed.

So the practical split is simple. On Desktop, a TXF file saves you the typing. On Online, which is what most people use now, nothing does, and the best any tool can do is hand you a summary shaped exactly like the screens you are about to fill in.

How to type a year of donations in about ten minutes

The trick is to stop entering items and start entering drop-offs. TurboTax wants a value per donation per organization; it does not need a separate line for every shirt, and item-level detail belongs in your own records rather than in the interview.

1. Sort your list by organization, then by date. Every organization is one pass through the interview.
2. For each drop-off, enter one item entry per broad category: clothing, household goods, books, and so on, with the total value you determined for that category on that date.
3. Enter cash gifts separately from item donations. They are substantiated differently and the software asks different questions.
4. Answer the acquisition and cost questions for anything valuable enough to trigger them, using the notes you prepared.
5. Keep your detailed backing records. What you type is a summary; what you keep is the evidence behind it.

What to keep afterwards

Typing figures into a return is not the same as substantiating them. The thresholds that generally apply:

• $250 or more for a single contribution: a contemporaneous written acknowledgment from the organization is generally required. An unfilled drop-box slip does not meet that standard.
• More than $500 of total non-cash contributions for the year: Form 8283 generally comes into play, with the acquisition and basis detail described above.
• More than $5,000 for an item or a group of similar items: Section B and a qualified appraisal generally apply.
• Condition: clothing and household items generally must be in good used condition or better to be deductible at all.

Publication 1771 covers the acknowledgment rules from the charity's side, which is useful when you need to ask one for a letter. Our substantiation guide puts the thresholds in one place.

Making next year less annoying

Everything above is recovery work. The reason it is painful is that the valuing and the record-keeping are happening in April for donations made in March, June, and December, which is precisely the habit ItsDeductible existed to prevent.

DeductiBee is built for the other order: log the bag on the day you drop it, value it then from a dataset that shows its sources, attach a photo of the receipt, and arrive at filing season with the work done. At that point it produces a manual-entry summary laid out the way the TurboTax donation screens ask for it, plus a TXF file if you use Desktop, a Form 8283 worksheet, and a plain CSV. Raw CSV export is free on every tier.

It is targeting the App Store for November 2026. In the meantime the donation value calculator and the value guide are free in a browser, which is enough to get this year's figures together. If you are deciding what to use, DeductiBee vs ItsDeductible lays out the comparison, including what we cannot replace.