Where to Enter Shareholder Basis in UltraTax CS

A dialog, not a screen

Basis is not on an input screen. Open Shareholder Information, go to the Other Info tab for the shareholder, and open the Shareholder Basis dialog. Any entry there triggers the calculation.

UltraTax then produces a Shareholder Basis Worksheet detailing stock and loan basis. It appears in the Schedule K-1 package in Form View, under the Shr folder, on the Basis and P2 tabs.

When the worksheet does not appear

Check the suppressions before checking the inputs. The 1120 tab in the General folder carries fields that suppress the basis calculation and suppress data sharing, including a beginning basis data share field.

Suppressing the worksheet calculation also stops basis data from sharing to the 1040 client, which is the quiet version of the problem: the entity return looks fine and the shareholder's preparer gets nothing.

Loan basis has its own tab

Beginning balance, current year loans and repayments go on the Loan tab, and UltraTax computes the year end principal from them.

It also runs a check worth relying on: a diagnostic prints when total shareholder loan principal does not agree with Schedule L line 19(d). That is a genuine reconciliation between the equity analysis and the balance sheet, and it catches the common case where a repayment was netted against the loan account on the books and never entered.

Negative basis

UltraTax cannot limit basis to zero when Other decreases entries exceed the available basis, so a negative figure on the worksheet is a signal rather than a result to accept.

Basis stops at zero. Losses beyond basis are suspended at the shareholder level, and distributions beyond basis generally produce capital gain on the shareholder's return. A negative worksheet balance means the entries need revisiting, usually because an amount was entered as an other decrease that should have been limited or allocated differently.

Why the entity preparer should care

The limitations apply on the shareholder's 1040, not here. But the facts live on the entity return, and basis data shares to the 1040 client automatically for the current year items.

Beginning of year basis and prior suspended losses share only when the relevant data share fields are marked, which means a new client's history does not travel unless somebody sets it up.