When the figure does not look like the paper
A K-1 amount came out wrong. Here is where to look.
Scanned K-1s fail in a short list of places. Knowing the list turns a hunt through twenty boxes into a check of four or five cells.
The six that account for most of it
Characters that change what a cell means
A misread digit inside a single amount is invisible to arithmetic: box 1 has nothing to add up against. What makes it findable is the comparison with the paper and the shape of the cell. The six substitutions below either change the figure or change whether the figure is a number at all.
| What happens | Printed | Read as | Where it shows up |
|---|---|---|---|
| O and 0 | O | 0 | An account number in Part I or a dollars-and-cents figure on a faint scan. A zero read as the letter O turns the cell into text and the amount leaves the totals. |
| 1 and l | 1 | l | Partner EINs and the smaller boxes where the type is condensed. The figure looks plausible; only comparing it with the paper shows the substitution. |
| 5 and S | 5 | S | Box 19 distributions and box 18 of an S-corporation K-1. A five read as an S is a text cell, not a number. |
| 8 and B | 8 | B | Amounts printed in a tight font. The digit is right or it is not; there is no arithmetic inside a single cell to catch it. |
| (1,240.00) as 1,240.00 | ( | — | A loss in parentheses. If the closing parenthesis is lost, the sign is unknown, and a loss can be typed as income. |
| 1,234,567 split in two | , | — | A comma read as a column boundary produces two cells, or drops the digits after it entirely. |
Box by box
Where the damage lands once a character is wrong
Box 1 income, box 9 net rental and box 19 distributions feed the partner's return directly, so a misread there moves a tax figure. Box 14 and box 20 carry coded lines whose amounts sit on an attached statement, so a lost code letter or a misplaced amount moves money between lines rather than away from the return.
The workbench sorts the review list by how much a box matters, not by page order: single-amount boxes with a value first, then coded boxes whose lines fail to add up, then blanks and STMT lines that need reading from the attachment. That order is a sorting rule, not a judgement about which cells are right.
Limits
What this cannot tell you
A single amount box has no internal arithmetic, so a digit swapped for another digit that keeps the cell numeric will not be caught by any check inside the tool. Only the paper catches it. What the tool can do is put the paper one click away and keep a record of which boxes a person has actually looked at.
K-3 statements are not read. If box 16 indicates a K-3 is attached, that fact is flagged and the K-3 itself is left to you.
Plain answers
Questions about a wrong figure
Why did a K-1 box come out blank?
Three reasons. The box may genuinely be blank on the paper. The value may be on the attached statement (STMT) rather than in the box. Or the scan was too poor to read the cell, in which case the cell is listed in the review list rather than filled with a guess. A blank is never treated as zero.
A loss came out as income. How?
Parentheses. If the closing bracket is lost in a scan, the sign cannot be read, so the figure is held for you to confirm instead of being assigned a sign by the tool. If a value did arrive with the wrong sign, re-open the box and compare it with the paper: the printed character is shown next to the value.
Can the tool correct a figure it reads wrongly?
No. It can flag the cell, show both readings when a second pass disagrees, and show the crop of the scan it read from. Changing the number is your call, and the change is recorded with your correction beside the printed text, not in place of it.
What does it check beyond the reading itself?
The line-by-line totals that the form allows: for a coded box, the sum of its code lines; for boxes that repeat across a statement, the total printed on the statement. When those do not meet, both figures are shown with the exact difference. There is no arithmetic to check for a single amount box, so a lone misread digit there is only visible against the paper.
Does it work on a scanned K-1, and what does it cost?
Yes, and a scan carries more flags than a text PDF. Free: no account needed, up to 10 pages per K-1. A paid plan converts the whole return with every box and code in one CSV. It does not file anything and does not enter anything into tax software.
Check your own K-1 against the paper
Free: no account needed, up to 10 pages per K-1. Nothing is filed and nothing is entered into tax software for you.