How do I tag my estimated tax payment, made prior to 1/15/21, to the 2020 tax year?

Xander

I made an estimated tax payment to the Feds for 2020 on 5 January 2021. How do I get Quicken to recognize that it is a 2020 withholding, rather than 2021?

Rocket J Squirrel

Make sure the Tax Planner is looking at Scheduled Bills & Deposits. See below where it has correctly noticed my 1/11/21 scheduled payment. If I change it to your date of 1/5/21, it still sees it even though it's no longer "scheduled".

NotACPA

In my copy of Q, I've got separate categories for current year tax & withholding vs prior year tax.

SO, under my TAXES category there's a "Prior Yr Tax" sub-cat and it has sub-cats for FED and State.  Neither has a IRS tax line associated with it, as payments for prior years are not, themselves, taxable items.

Xander

Thanks for the suggestions.
When I first reconciled this transaction, I just selected the Federal tax category ("Tax:Fed.") It didn't ask me if it was for 2020 or 2021, which it has done with refund checks in the past. So I can get the 2020 withholding to be accurate, by adding a "user entered" adjustment to the Estimated Tax Payments page, but it's still tagging the amounts for this payment to the 2021 tax year. I've tried to edit the transaction, reclassify the naming rule, but nothing has affected which year Quicken believes this supports.

UKR

If all else fails, record this payment with a date of 12/31/2020.

markus1957

If you don't have one, create an Estimated Fed Tax Payment category (or subcategory under Tax:Fed) associated with the tax line "Form 1040:Federal estimated tax, qrtrly".  The tax planner will recognize payments made before Jan 15 (plus a few days to account for weekends/holidays) as an estimated payment for the previous year and populate it the correct year of the Tax Planner.

adding- when settling up taxes owed for the previous year on April 15, I use the method suggested by @NotACPA.  But if this is truly an estimated payment, by assigning the correct tax line to the category, Quicken will treat it as such.