Missing "Taxable IRA Withdrawal" Category

jz

My Quicken for MAC file is missing a required category: Taxable IRA Withdrawal. I created a new file starting from scratch and the category is present as a subcategory of Personal Income. The category is not present in the file I use to track my banking and investing accounts which has years of data and thousands of transactions.

What should I do to restore "Taxable IRA Withdrawal" as a required category?

Should I recreate the category by hand? I've tried this, but I cannot turn on the "Required" flag. Isn't the "required" flag used where special handling is required? What is special about the "Taxable IRA Withdrawal" category? Will the category work right if the flag is missing?

I'm using Quicken Premier Version 6.0.3 (Build 600.37136.100) macOS 11.1

jacobs

@jz  First, I'm not sure how your live Quicken data file is missing one of the required categories, since Quicken will not allow you to delete them. That's a little concerning, but I suspect you'll never know how it happened, so for the moment I'm going to say to ignore it and move on…

You can create a category on your own and associate it with the proper tax form. The "Required" label doesn't make a category do anything special, other than -- theoretically! -- prevent it from being deleted.

So go ahead and create a category* for Taxable IRA Withdrawal, on its own or as a sub-category of Personal Income, whichever you prefer. Then double-click on Taxable IRA Withdrawal, click the "Tax-Related" box, and in the resulting menu, click on 1099-R on the left side, and "Total IRA taxable distrib." on the right side. 

That leaves me with a question, though: have you taken taxable IRA withdrawals in the past? If so, can you find one of those transactions and see what Category is associated with it? You may want to change past taxable withdrawals to the category you created. 

*There's one possible alternative to creating the category on your own. It's something I've never tested because I've never deleted a required category (even though I've tried!). At the bottom of the Categories window, when you click the Gear icon, the last choice in the menu is "Add default categories". Before trying it, I'd advise making a copy of your data file in case there's any adverse result of trying this. After making a backup, try selecting that menu option and see if it restores the Taxable IRA Withdrawal to your list of Categories. (Of course, if you've deleted/modified/merged lots of non-required Quicken default categories in the past, this might create more work to clean up than you want to deal with, but it still might be worth trying on a copy of your data file just to see what it will do.)

jz

> @jacobs said:
>
> *There's one possible alternative to creating the category on your own. It's something I've never tested because I've never deleted a required category (even though I've tried!). At the bottom of the Categories window, when you click the Gear icon, the last choice in the menu is "Add default categories".

Great! I never noticed that. I've done as you suggested and it leaves me with a lot of unused categories. Only some of them are required. I'll delete the un-required unused categories that I don't need. Thanks.

> That leaves me with a question, though: have you taken taxable IRA withdrawals in the past? If so, can you find one of those transactions and see what Category is associated with it? You may want to change past taxable withdrawals to the category you created. 

2020 is the first year I've tried this. It's a flaky getting the numbers to work right, but this community made some suggestions. I use automatic downloads and the broker provides three transactions: (a) the net amount that gets credited to a non-deferred account, (b) the Federal Withholding, and (c) the State Withholding. What I need on the quicken tax report is the total taxable distribution which is the sum of all three as the individual withholding categores. Quicken seems to lack support for this, but I was hoping that the missing category did what I want under the covers (like how unrealized capital gains work). Right now, to circumvent the lack of support, I add 2 splits to each of the downloaded transactions (see the screen shot). The splits cancel each other out: one goes to a "Void" category and the other goes to a "Taxable IRA Distribution" category. The values of the splits match the original values of the transactions. I exclude the Void category from my reports and everything works out. This is error-prone busy work that I'd prefer to avoid.

Thanks for your help and quick response.

jacobs

@jz  First, I'm not sure how your live Quicken data file is missing one of the required categories, since Quicken will not allow you to delete them. That's a little concerning, but I suspect you'll never know how it happened, so for the moment I'm going to say to ignore it and move on…

You can create a category on your own and associate it with the proper tax form. The "Required" label doesn't make a category do anything special, other than -- theoretically! -- prevent it from being deleted.

So go ahead and create a category* for Taxable IRA Withdrawal, on its own or as a sub-category of Personal Income, whichever you prefer. Then double-click on Taxable IRA Withdrawal, click the "Tax-Related" box, and in the resulting menu, click on 1099-R on the left side, and "Total IRA taxable distrib." on the right side. 

That leaves me with a question, though: have you taken taxable IRA withdrawals in the past? If so, can you find one of those transactions and see what Category is associated with it? You may want to change past taxable withdrawals to the category you created. 

*There's one possible alternative to creating the category on your own. It's something I've never tested because I've never deleted a required category (even though I've tried!). At the bottom of the Categories window, when you click the Gear icon, the last choice in the menu is "Add default categories". Before trying it, I'd advise making a copy of your data file in case there's any adverse result of trying this. After making a backup, try selecting that menu option and see if it restores the Taxable IRA Withdrawal to your list of Categories. (Of course, if you've deleted/modified/merged lots of non-required Quicken default categories in the past, this might create more work to clean up than you want to deal with, but it still might be worth trying on a copy of your data file just to see what it will do.)

jz

> @jacobs said:
>
> *There's one possible alternative to creating the category on your own. It's something I've never tested because I've never deleted a required category (even though I've tried!). At the bottom of the Categories window, when you click the Gear icon, the last choice in the menu is "Add default categories".

Great! I never noticed that. I've done as you suggested and it leaves me with a lot of unused categories. Only some of them are required. I'll delete the un-required unused categories that I don't need. Thanks.

> That leaves me with a question, though: have you taken taxable IRA withdrawals in the past? If so, can you find one of those transactions and see what Category is associated with it? You may want to change past taxable withdrawals to the category you created. 

2020 is the first year I've tried this. It's a flaky getting the numbers to work right, but this community made some suggestions. I use automatic downloads and the broker provides three transactions: (a) the net amount that gets credited to a non-deferred account, (b) the Federal Withholding, and (c) the State Withholding. What I need on the quicken tax report is the total taxable distribution which is the sum of all three as the individual withholding categores. Quicken seems to lack support for this, but I was hoping that the missing category did what I want under the covers (like how unrealized capital gains work). Right now, to circumvent the lack of support, I add 2 splits to each of the downloaded transactions (see the screen shot). The splits cancel each other out: one goes to a "Void" category and the other goes to a "Taxable IRA Distribution" category. The values of the splits match the original values of the transactions. I exclude the Void category from my reports and everything works out. This is error-prone busy work that I'd prefer to avoid.

Thanks for your help and quick response.