SwitchingA tool inside a tax return

How to switch from TurboTax to DeductiBee

This page is different from the others, because there is no donation file to export. Everything you entered lives inside a tax return, so getting it out means getting the return out and then retyping. That sounds worse than it is: the return PDF with worksheets is a genuine record, and it is the thing to save before another filing season buries it. If the records you actually want are your old ItsDeductible ones, that is a different route, and it has its own guide.

TurboTax today
Not a standalone product. Since the ItsDeductible shutdown, the surviving feature is a fair market value lookup inside the TurboTax Online return flow, reached from Deductions and credits, then Donations to charity. It stores nothing itself: the value you pick is typed into the return.
Can you get a file out
NoPDF, Proprietary .tax file
Intuit documents no donation-level export, and community answers on their own forum say there is none. The documented artifacts are a return PDF and a proprietary TurboTax data file.
Before you start

What trips people up moving off TurboTax

  • Printing or saving your own return requires paying your TurboTax fees first, per Intuit's own article.
  • The default print copy is the filing copy. Item detail generally appears only if you tick the option to include government and TurboTax worksheets.
  • The IRS Form 8283 instructions put the threshold for the form at more than $500 of non-cash donations, so a modest year may contain no itemized non-cash form in the return at all, only the optional worksheets.
  • The .tax file is proprietary and opens only in TurboTax software. It is a backup, not a migration format.
  • TXF appears to travel one way. Intuit's import article covers importing into TurboTax Desktop and says nothing about exporting, and a contributor on Intuit's forum stated in February 2026 that TurboTax Online does not support importing TXF or CSV files for charitable donations either.
  • Online returns are available for seven years, per Intuit. Older ones are not retrievable from the vault.
  • The click paths above come from Intuit help articles written for earlier tax years, because those are the versions that document these screens. Expect the wording to have drifted.
Step one

Get your records out of TurboTax

Two routes exist and they do different jobs. The PDF with worksheets is readable and retypeable, and is gated behind paying your TurboTax fees. The .tax data file is a backup that only TurboTax software opens. On TXF, be precise about what is actually documented: Intuit's own article describes importing a TXF file into TurboTax Desktop and does not describe exporting one. A note on the click paths below: the Intuit articles that document them were written for earlier tax years, so treat the button wording as a guide rather than a guarantee for the current season.

  1. 1Pay your TurboTax fees firstPrinting or saving a copy is gated on payment. Intuit's article states that if you have not already paid, you will be asked to pay before you can print your return. There is no documented free path to the PDF.
  2. 2Print the return through Print CenterIn TurboTax Online, open the return, select Tax Tools from the menu, then Print Center, then print, save, or preview this year's return.
  3. 3Tick Include government and TurboTax worksheetsThis is the step that matters and it is not the default. Intuit's instructions offer the worksheets as an option alongside the federal return, and community answers on Intuit's own forum say this is what surfaces a Charitable Donation Worksheet for each charity entered. Without it, your item detail generally does not appear in the PDF at all.
  4. 4Pull prior years from DocumentsSign in with the same user ID, select Documents, choose the tax year, then Download tax PDF. Intuit states you can access returns for the past seven years. A different user ID will not show them.
  5. 5Save the .tax data file as a backupSelect Tax Tools, then Tools, then save your return to your computer. Intuit says the file downloads with a name like taxReturn.tax2025. Keep it, but do not mistake it for a migration file: it is proprietary and no third-party tracker reads it.
  6. 6Re-key the list from the worksheetsOpen the Charitable Donation Worksheet pages in the PDF and type charity, date, item and value into your new tracker. Tedious, and unavoidable: there is no documented donation export to automate it.
Step two

Bring the file into DeductiBee

DeductiBee works out what the file is rather than asking you, so these three steps are the same whatever you exported from.

  1. 7Open Import in DeductiBee and pick your fileImport lives in onboarding and in Settings afterwards, so it is there whether you are new or have been using the app for a year. Choose the file from Files, iCloud Drive, or whatever app it landed in.
  2. 8Check the preview before anything is savedDeductiBee reads the file, works out which columns are which, and shows you what it found: how many donations, which tax years, and how each condition tier maps onto Like new, Good, and Fair. Nothing is written to your records until you accept that preview.
  3. 9Confirm the organizations it rebuiltMost exports list a charity name on every row rather than a separate list of organizations, so DeductiBee reconstructs the list from those rows and shows it to you to confirm or merge. Re-importing the same file later does not duplicate anything.

Importing your own history is free on every tier, permanently, and so is exporting your raw data again later. Neither is behind the paywall, on principle: your records are yours.

The honest part

What comes with you, and what does not

No migration is lossless. Knowing which half is which before you start is the difference between a move and a surprise.

Comes with you

  • Charity name and donation date, as entered
  • The donation value you typed
  • Cash contribution amounts
  • Form 8283 detail when non-cash totals exceed $500
  • A Charitable Donation Worksheet per charity, in the worksheets copy of the PDF

Does not come with you

  • Any machine-readable donation file. Intuit documents no CSV, JSON or TXF export of the donation list
  • Item photos or receipt images. Nothing in the documented donation flow stores them
  • The condition tier behind each value. The valuation tool shows you a like-new and a used figure, but you carry over only the dollar amount you typed
  • The valuation tool's underlying ranges and sourcing, which are a lookup you consult rather than data you keep
  • Pre-shutdown ItsDeductible history, which is not inside TurboTax and comes only from a separate Intuit account request
  • Anything from a return older than seven years, or filed under a different Intuit user ID
FAQ

Questions about leaving TurboTax

Can I export my donation list from TurboTax?
Not as a donation file, as far as anything Intuit publishes goes. Their documentation describes no CSV, JSON or TXF export of the donation list, their import article covers TXF moving into TurboTax Desktop rather than out, and contributors on their own forum say the same. What you can get is the return itself, as a PDF with worksheets or a proprietary .tax backup, and then retype from it.
Why does my saved PDF not show my individual items?
Almost certainly because the worksheets option was not ticked. The default print is the filing copy. Intuit's instructions offer including government and TurboTax worksheets as a separate checkbox, and community answers say that is what produces a Charitable Donation Worksheet per charity.
Is the TurboTax valuation tool a replacement for ItsDeductible?
Intuit states plainly that it is not. It exists only inside TurboTax at filing time, keeps no records between years, and does nothing for you if you file somewhere else. That is the whole argument for tracking donations as you make them rather than reconstructing them in April. The full comparison is here.
I used ItsDeductible through TurboTax. Where is that data?
Not inside TurboTax, and this is the single most common wrong assumption about the shutdown. Those records come back through a separate Intuit account data request instead. That is a guide of its own, and it is the one to follow if the records you want predate October 21, 2025.
Method

Where these steps came from

The steps above were read off TurboTax's own public pages on August 9, 2026, and those pages are linked below so you can check the work. Menus and wording in other companies' products change without notice. If something here no longer matches what you see, we would rather hear about it than leave it wrong.

What we could not confirm

  • Whether the Charitable Donation Worksheet lists individual items or only per-charity totals. The only description we found is a community answer on Intuit's forum, and we could not inspect the worksheet itself.
  • Whether TurboTax Desktop has any valuation lookup at all. Community answers say no; Intuit's own article describes TurboTax Online throughout and does not state Desktop's status either way.
  • Whether the Intuit account data download contains return or donation entries, and in what shape. The article documents the file types and the ItsDeductible folder, but does not enumerate return contents.
  • Whether the save-your-return option is present for every user, tier and filing state. Community reports say it can be missing.
  • Whether an undocumented export exists somewhere in a product this large. We can tell you what Intuit documents and what its forum contributors say, which is not the same as proving a negative.
Keep reading

Next

Moving from something else

Bring it all with you

Your donation history should outlive the app you kept it in.

Import what you already have, value what you gave next with a source attached, and export the paperwork when you file.

Nothing to lose in the move

Import is free, re-importing the same file does not duplicate anything, and you can export your raw data again whenever you want.

Records that stay yours

Everything lives on your iPhone, syncing only through your own private iCloud database.

DeductiBee on the App StoreFree to start, with 20 new item entries a year. Import and raw export are free on every tier.