Amending prior returns with assets

Hi Tax Pros, I hope you are well. When you prepare and 1040X and the customer has schedule C with many assets. Do you put in all the assets separately with A/D, etc. or just the total depreciation for the year based on the original return? We have a customer who has around 20 assets, and we have to amend her prior year returns because of an NOL. We are have already prepared her 2018 tax return and forward so we have the assets going forward since 2018. It is too late to file the IRS form 1045 so we need to go back to 2015 to start the amended return. We are trying to find the most efficient way to prepare this return. Thank you for any insight.

If I'm amending a tax return where I didn't already have the original, I may take some shortcuts on any forms that the IRS won't see, like especially if the amendment is being filed on paper - we only need to attach the forms that changed. So if you know for sure how much depreciation you need to deduct, and you don't need the tax software to calculate it for you based on those 20 assets, then you can just override the depreciation amount to save the time of typing them all in.

Thank you Bearden, this is what I was thinking as well.

In UltraTax we can just copy the assets from 2018 and paste them into 2015.

If you do the copy thing that NIght suggested, you will of course still have to make amendments to delete assets purchased in 2016, 2017, 2018 and add assets the existed in 2015 but didn't in 2018. And your copy/paste method wouldn't pick up the correct Accum Depn through 2014 either. I'd rather not.

Since you have the 2015 tax return, just put in the 2015 total depn expense in the "override" field like beardenjv suggested. I had to do this recently, but then, without the detail on some of the forms, the amended AMT wouldn't calculate correctly, so I had to make a manual adjustment for that, too. Still easier than entering the 100 assets and all the other details the client had, tho.