How do you enter a State sales tax penalty in Quicken for Windows Home and Business

Question

How do you enter a State sales tax penalty into Quicken for Windows Home and Business?
 I collected the sales tax (it is a line item on the Invoice), but I have been assessed a late payment penalty by the state.  How do I properly enter this penalty into the *Sales Tax* Account?

YingDave · Answer

You could search through the category list (Ctrl+C) to find one you could use such as Bad Debts or Fees etc. What is more important is whether or not that penalty is claimable as a business expense or not. I suspect not - but you have to check with your accountant as I am not in your tax jurisdiction. If not you may have to create a business expense with no associated tax line so that it impacts your cash flow under the business related categories, but is not counted as a claimable expense in your profit/loss statements.

Quicken Francisco · Answer

@db808

Thanks for letting me know you were able to get it working. Thank you for also letting us know how it works as well. If you do have any other questions let us know and we'll take another look as well.

Thanks,
Quicken Francisco

db808 · Answer

Thank you for the quick reply. Your suggestion does not work as described, but I was able to talk it out with regular Quicken support

I tried you idea of using [*Sales Tax*] as the category when entering in the penalty when in the *Sales Tax* register, but you get an error about putting the money back into the same account.

What I did was use "Business Expenses:company name" as the category and added a memo entry of "Sales tax penalty"

When I paid the tax bill from the business checking account, I split the transaction with 2 split items. The key was to use the same [Business Checking XXXX] category for BOTH split items..  One split item has "Sales tax" in the memo field, and the second split item has "Sales tax penalty" in the memo field.  It works, and the *Sales Tax* account now shows a zero balance.

I'll probably need to go back and create a custom business expense category and properly associate it as a child of the sales tax tax-category, but for now, this is good enough.