ItsDeductible vs a spreadsheet: what you actually lose going manual

After ItsDeductible shut down, a lot of people did the obvious thing and opened a spreadsheet. That is a more reasonable reaction than any app vendor is going to tell you it is. A spreadsheet is free, it opens anywhere, it will still open in twenty years, and no company can discontinue it. Given that the whole problem was a company discontinuing something, the instinct is correct rather than stubborn.

It is also only half the job. A spreadsheet is excellent at the arithmetic and useless at everything the arithmetic depends on. This post is about which half is which, and it includes a column template you are welcome to take and use whether or not you ever install anything of ours.

What a spreadsheet is genuinely good at

Cash donations, almost entirely. The amount is the amount: your bank record plus the organization's acknowledgment does most of the substantiation work, and a spreadsheet totaling a column is all the tooling that job needs. If your giving is checks and card payments, stop reading, open a spreadsheet, and you are done.

It is also good at the thing people underrate: it is yours. No account, no subscription, no migration when someone's roadmap changes. Every product in this category should be judged against that, ours included.

The four jobs it leaves you

Non-cash donations are the harder case, because the number in the cell is a conclusion rather than a fact. Four things have to happen before you can type it.

1. Determining a value for every item

This is the work ItsDeductible was actually doing, and losing it is the reason its shutdown mattered. Fair market value is defined by the IRS as the price the property would sell for on the open market, agreed between a willing buyer and a willing seller, with neither required to act and both having reasonable knowledge of the relevant facts.

For used goods, Publication 561 is direct: used clothing and other personal items are usually worth far less than what you paid, and the price buyers actually pay in consignment or thrift shops is an indication of value. So the method is comparables, per item, every time. That is not hard for one coat. It is genuinely hard for the nine bags that come out of a house clearance, and a spreadsheet does not help with any of it.

2. Keeping the evidence with the row

A row saying "winter coats, $95" is an assertion. What supports it lives elsewhere: the drop-off slip in a drawer, the photo in your camera roll, the acknowledgment letter in your email. A year later, reassembling which photo belongs to which row is the part that goes wrong, and reconstructing evidence after the fact is much weaker than keeping it attached at the time.

3. Shaping it the way the form asks

Form 8283 does not ask what your spreadsheet naturally records. Section A asks, for items over $500, the date you acquired the property, how you acquired it, and your cost or adjusted basis. Almost nobody's donation spreadsheet has those three columns, and nobody can reconstruct them for a coat bought in 2019 by staring at a total.

4. Noticing when a threshold is crossed

Thresholds arrive silently. You must file Form 8283 if the deduction for each non-cash contribution is more than $500, including a group of similar items totaling more than $500. Above $5,000 for an item or a group of similar items, Section B and a qualified appraisal generally apply, and the instructions define similar items as items of the same general category or type, such as clothing, books, jewelry, or coin collections. A spreadsheet will happily let you sail past all of that without a word.

If you are going to use a spreadsheet, use these columns

Take this. It is the minimum that keeps you out of trouble later, and it is shaped so that the awkward questions are answered when they are easy to answer rather than in April.

Add a per-year, per-organization total, and a per-category total so you can see the $500 and $5,000 lines approaching. Keep the receipts and photos in a folder named for the tax year, and back it up somewhere that is not one company's account, which is the actual lesson of the last two years.

What has to exist outside the spreadsheet either way

• A contemporaneous written acknowledgment from the organization for any single contribution of $250 or more. Publication 1771 sets out what one has to contain.
• Proof of the condition standard: clothing and household items generally must be in good used condition or better to be deductible at all, with a narrow exception for an item deducted at more than $500 supported by a qualified appraisal and Section B.
• A qualified appraisal where one is required, generally above $5,000 for an item or group of similar items.

Our substantiation guide and Form 8283 guide go through each of these with the source text linked.

Where an app actually helps

Not with the arithmetic. With the four jobs above. DeductiBee values each item from a dataset that shows the source next to every range, keeps the photo attached to the item rather than in a folder, prompts the acquisition and basis questions when an item crosses the threshold that makes them matter, and tracks category totals so the $500 and $5,000 lines are visible before you cross them. At filing time it produces a Form 8283 worksheet in the layout the form asks for, plus CSV, TXF, and a manual-entry summary for typing into whatever product you use.

You can test the hardest of those jobs without installing anything: the donation value calculator and the per-category value guide run in a browser, and every range shows its source. If they save you an hour and you go back to your spreadsheet afterwards, that is a fine outcome.

And if you do try DeductiBee and change your mind, raw CSV export is free on every tier, permanently, including after a subscription lapses. Your records also live on your iPhone rather than on a server here. That is the only honest way to answer the spreadsheet argument: not by claiming a service cannot disappear, but by making sure it would not matter if it did.

Moving your records over? The ItsDeductible import guide covers both file shapes, and this walkthrough covers getting your data back after the October 2025 deadline.