Property Tax Payments in Two Different Years

Question

I am using Quicken for Mac Premier 2019 v. 5.12.4 (Build512.29280.100) on Mojave v. 10.14.6. My property taxes are due in November, 2019 and May, 2020. When I choose twice yearly it defaults to the current year. That behavior seems logical, but is there a work around for a payment in two separate years or should I just enter two bills.

jacobs · Answer

Right, that's what I was saying, slightly differently: you have to allow it to create a transaction in the past that isn't correct, and then get rid of that bogus past transaction. Maybe it's a questionable design since there's a way around it, but I'd call it a bug not to be able to start from today and create a twice a year schedule going forward. (I suspect the programmer and testers were doing this part of the program in the first half of this year, and never ran into this situation. ;)  )

AnneK48 · Answer

I actually set the first instance up as 10/15/2019 and set it as you did above and it worked! My next instance is 04/15/2020. Thank you. It's interesting - I have been using Quicken for Mac for about eight months now but I still have PC think. It looked to me like the drop down arrow next to "Starting" was grayed out so I didn't click on it. I'll have to be more adventurous. :)

jacobs · Answer

@AnneK48 Oh, interesting! There is definitely a bug here. The settings for Every two weeks, twice  amonth, every four weeks, and quarterly all work as epxected, but the setting for Twice a Year has a bug where it tries to fit both dates in the current year, and it won't let you enter a date in this year and next year. (And no, @NotACPA, you can't say "Every 6 months")

If I enter Twice a year, today (9/18/19), the dates default to 3/18/19 and 9/19/19.

That's odd, that it would choose the first date way in the past, but okay… we'll just edit the dates. Except you can't get a date in 2020 in there! If I click in the first date field and select 10/1/19, it moves 9/18/2019 to the first field and puts 10/1/19 in the second field -- and repeats those two dates in subsequent years. Any attempt to edit the dates results in unexpected oddness of one or both dates changing.

So you need to enter the two dates for this year even though one is in the past -- like 4/1/19 and 10/1/19 -- and enter the transaction. Then find the bogus transaction dated earlier this year, mark it Paid, and delete it. And then all your future transactions will be fine.