How to import ItsDeductible into DeductiBee

If you kept donation records in ItsDeductible for years, the thing you want from a replacement is not features. It is your history, intact, without retyping four hundred rows. This walks through exactly how that works in DeductiBee: which files it reads, what each column becomes, what it does with the parts of the old data that do not map cleanly, and what to check afterwards.

First, work out which file you have

There are two, and they are not the same shape.

If you have neither, you can still get the second one. The request takes about five minutes and Intuit states it can take up to 15 days to arrive. The full process is in missed the October 21 deadline? How to get your ItsDeductible data back.

DeductiBee reads both. It detects which shape a file is rather than asking you to declare it, because the honest answer is that most people do not remember which export they made two years ago.

The import flow

1. Get the file onto your iPhone. Email it to yourself, drop it in iCloud Drive or Files, or use the share sheet from wherever it already lives. DeductiBee accepts a share from any app as well as picking a file directly.
2. Open DeductiBee and choose Import in settings, then pick the file. Multiple files at once is fine, which matters for the CSV route since a full year is five separate files.
3. Review the mapping preview. DeductiBee shows what it thinks each column is, how many rows it read, how many organizations it found, and the total value it is about to bring in. Nothing is saved until you confirm.
4. Fix anything that looks wrong. Column mapping is editable, so an unusual export or a file you have opened and re-saved in a spreadsheet app can still be pointed at the right fields.
5. Confirm. The rows land as donations attached to organizations, with the tax year preserved.

What happens to each field

Organizations, rebuilt from the rows

The pre-shutdown CSVs had a well-known defect: they exported donations but not the charity list. People complained about it loudly at the time, and it is the single most annoying thing about that file, because the charity name sits right there on every row.

DeductiBee rebuilds the list from the charity name and address columns, deduplicates them, and shows you the result before saving so you can merge the three spellings of the same thrift shop into one. If your file is the data-request spreadsheet and it already contains organizations, those are used directly.

Condition tiers, translated

The old product used value tiers rather than pure condition labels. Its exports carry a quality column containing High, Medium, or Other. DeductiBee uses condition wording, which matches both how the IRS talks about donated goods and how most people actually think about a sweater. The mapping is fixed:

There is no Low or Poor tier on either side. The old product disabled its Low column after the 2006 law change, and we never built one, because Publication 526 states that clothing and household items generally are not deductible unless they are in good used condition or better. A tier for items below that standard would mostly help people claim things they cannot claim.

Values, left exactly as they were

This is the important one. DeductiBee does not re-price imported history. The value on each imported row is the value that was on the return you filed, and rewriting it with our own dataset would corrupt a record you may one day need to explain. Imported items are marked as imported, carrying the value from the file, and they are excluded from the free tier's new-item allowance because they are not new items.

Our valuation dataset applies to what you log from here on. If you want to see how our ranges compare before you commit, the calculator and the value guide run in a browser with no account, and every range shows the source it came from.

Cash, mileage, and stock

Cash rows import with their payment type, reference detail, description, and receipt flag. Mileage rows import with miles driven, the rate that was applied, and any other transportation costs. Stock rows import as records: DeductiBee v1 does not add new stock donations, because donated securities bring Form 8283 questions that deserve proper handling rather than a half-built screen, but refusing to carry your existing stock history would be a strange way to treat a migration. It comes across and it is visible.

Photos, which do not exist

There are none to import. ItsDeductible never supported attaching images in any era, which its own help pages stated plainly. Everything you import will have an empty evidence slot, and that is not a defect in the importer. It is the gap the old product left, and going forward it is the one worth closing first.

Re-importing the same file

Safe. The importer is idempotent: run the same file twice and you get one copy of each donation, not two. This matters more than it sounds, because the realistic migration is not one clean pass. It is importing 2024, realizing you also have 2023 somewhere, finding the mileage file you missed, and running the thing four times over a weekend.

If a file genuinely contains a corrected version of a row you already imported, the preview shows you what changed before anything is written.

What to check after importing

• Organization count. If you see two entries for the same charity because the old data had two spellings of its address, merge them now while the list is short.
• Year totals against your filed returns. Your Schedule A non-cash figure for a given year should match what came in for that year. If it does not, you probably have a file missing rather than a bad import.
• Anything above $500. Form 8283 Section A asks for the date you acquired an item, how you acquired it, and what it cost you, and the old export did not carry those fields. If a prior year included a high-value item, that detail lives in your own records rather than in the file.
• Custom items. Rows that came in as Other were self-valued in the old product. They are worth a second look, since they were the rows nobody was checking your arithmetic on.

Our Form 8283 guide covers what Section A actually asks for, and the substantiation guide covers the record-keeping thresholds.

Getting back out again

Worth saying out loud, since you have just been through a migration you did not choose. Raw CSV export from DeductiBee is free on every tier, including the free tier and after a subscription lapses, and it always will be. Your records also live on your iPhone rather than on a server here, syncing only through your own private iCloud database if you turn sync on.

Which means there is nothing here to shut down, and no version of this where you find out in September that you have six weeks to get your data out. That was the point of building it this way. Full detail on what is free and what is not is on the pricing page, and the side-by-side with the old product is on DeductiBee vs ItsDeductible.