How to run Tax Planner without double counting business income

Peter O'Neill

When I run the Tax Planner in Quicken Home, Business & Rental Property it records each income event twice, first when I invoice the amount, second when I receive the payment against that invoice.

Since an invoice is merely a statement, it seems to me that Q should only record the receipt of a payment. I spent a total of 6 hours yesterday with 2 Q utterly incompetent support people who knew no more than I about how to use the business features of Q.

 Instead of answering my request for how to properly configure and categorize business transactions, they spent most of their time doing inpertinent file integrity checks and virus scans, then hunted around the menus looking for (not knowing) something that might work.

 In the process they damaged my invoice records and and caused me to lose considerable income while I was not able to do my consulting work.

UKR

Quicken Help (press the F1 key from anywhere in Quicken to access it) has a IMHO pretty good "Manage your business" book that tells you about how Quicken does business transactions.

You want to set up your business accounts, Customer Invoices (A/R), Vendor Invoices (A/P) and "*Sales Tax*" (the latter should get automatically created as part of the setup, but may be marked as a hidden account)

You create Customer Invoices for the sale of your parts or services.
Within the Customer Invoices account you record all other business transactions, e.g. payments received, refunds, etc. usually as transfers from your Checking account. (Do not record a transaction in Checking and mark it as transfer to A/R. That won't properly mark invoices as paid.)
Line items within each customer invoice are categorized as Business Income to one of the categories that are defined as tax related category with an appropriate Schedule C line item
Ditto for using Vendor Invoices to pay your business expenses.

I would have to see how your transactions are currently recorded, to see what's wrong.

Can you please capture one or more images of the parts of your Quicken window showing the issue, sensitive information blacked out as necessary to protect your privacy but annotated to describe the situation, and attach the image(s) here?
The Windows Snipping Tool (available with Windows 7 and up) can be used to capture a partial screen image and save it to a file.  Microsoft Paint can be used to annotate the image.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13776/windows-use-snipping-tool-to-capture-screenshots
To take a screenshot in Mac please see https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201361
Please create image files of type PNG, JPG or GIF only.
To attach the image here, start composing your reply in the "Type your comment" box at the bottom of this webpage. Drag and drop the image or, at the top of the text entry window you'll see a row of icons beginning with B I S
Click the "Attach image" icon (the one that looks like a tiny landscape with mountain and sun). It will allow you to select and upload the captured image file(s) from your computer. The captured image(s) will be inserted at wherever the cursor is located in the text.

Howard Roark

"Tax Planner ... records each income event twice, first when I invoice the amount, second when I receive the payment against that invoice."

I don't see that in Q2019 HB&RP R19.55. What release of Q2019 are you using?

Quicken should definitely not record both the invoice and the payment of that invoice as income.

"Since an invoice is merely a statement, it seems to me that Q should only record the receipt of a payment."

That is true only if you use "cash-basis" reporting. For those who use "accrual-basis" reporting, income is recognized when an invoice is issued (and payments of those invoices are ignored).

[See Edit > Preferences > Reports and Graphs > Cash-basis reporting if applicable.]

There's not enough info in your problem description for me to offer anything further.

How exactly are you determining that both the invoice and its payment are being treated as income by the Tax Planner?

Peter O'Neill

Here are my answers to your questions:

Quicken version: Quicken 2019 R20.15 Build 27.1.20.15 Since they switched to an annual subscription with automatic updates it’s hard not to be running the latest version.

Accounting basis: Cash

How I know Tax Planner is double counting:
Easy, Tax Planner lists all the transactions it totals for business income in a table at the bottom of the “Business Income or Loss – Schedule C” page. Each transaction appears first in black with the category “Accounts Receivable” and second in blue with the category “Consulting income”. The totals at the bottom of this table and at the top of the form indeed are double the true total of the income events.

I suspect that I have not set up my business accounts properly, especially their tax categorization, but hunting through the menus, which are not very well designed for the business features, does not give me any better ideas. I issue invoices in accounts receivable and receive payment against those invoices. What other information can I provide you to arrive at a solutions?

UKR

Quicken Help (press the F1 key from anywhere in Quicken to access it) has a IMHO pretty good "Manage your business" book that tells you about how Quicken does business transactions.

You want to set up your business accounts, Customer Invoices (A/R), Vendor Invoices (A/P) and "*Sales Tax*" (the latter should get automatically created as part of the setup, but may be marked as a hidden account)

You create Customer Invoices for the sale of your parts or services.
Within the Customer Invoices account you record all other business transactions, e.g. payments received, refunds, etc. usually as transfers from your Checking account. (Do not record a transaction in Checking and mark it as transfer to A/R. That won't properly mark invoices as paid.)
Line items within each customer invoice are categorized as Business Income to one of the categories that are defined as tax related category with an appropriate Schedule C line item
Ditto for using Vendor Invoices to pay your business expenses.

I would have to see how your transactions are currently recorded, to see what's wrong.

Can you please capture one or more images of the parts of your Quicken window showing the issue, sensitive information blacked out as necessary to protect your privacy but annotated to describe the situation, and attach the image(s) here?
The Windows Snipping Tool (available with Windows 7 and up) can be used to capture a partial screen image and save it to a file.  Microsoft Paint can be used to annotate the image.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13776/windows-use-snipping-tool-to-capture-screenshots
To take a screenshot in Mac please see https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201361
Please create image files of type PNG, JPG or GIF only.
To attach the image here, start composing your reply in the "Type your comment" box at the bottom of this webpage. Drag and drop the image or, at the top of the text entry window you'll see a row of icons beginning with B I S
Click the "Attach image" icon (the one that looks like a tiny landscape with mountain and sun). It will allow you to select and upload the captured image file(s) from your computer. The captured image(s) will be inserted at wherever the cursor is located in the text.