Bulk Edit "Tax-Related" for Categories

earshot

Well, obviously my categories, memorized transactions, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera didn't survive the trip from Quicken Mac 2016 to the New, Improved Quicken.

I thus ask fellow users if there is a way to "bulk edit" Categories since what Quicken perceives as a tax-related category wildly differs from mine and my accountants.

Thank you for any insights.

jacobs

Hmmm, everything from Quicken 2016 should have imported fully into the current Quicken Mac, including categories.

In any case, there's no way to select multiple categories and make them "tax related", because any category you make tax related must be assigned a specific tax line item, and there would be no way to that in bulk.

That said, I'm guessing you don't have too many categories which need to be changed to tax-related. 10? 15? It won't take too long; you just need to know which categories you've used which need to be attached to which tax line.

Another alternative is to merge your self-created categories into the default Quicken ones which are coded as tax-related. (Unfortunately, it won't let you merge any categories into existing investment categories.)

The other alternative, since you reference working with an accountant, is simply to print a report of all your income and expenses, and the accountant can pick out those which have tax ramifications. 

earshot

Thank you, Jacobs, for your thorough response.

Alas, Quicken Mac did NOT import much of anything correctly, and -- in the case of categories -- a former Quicken coder told me if there were are too many categories that didn't "match" preexisting ones in Quicken Mac during the data file "upgrade", the application simply chokes, and disregards all of them.

The categories imported generically, with none of their former tax line association, or that they were, at all, tax-related…period.

(As an aside, are you saying that all of your memorized transactions carried across? Amazing.)

Another coding issue was marrying "tax-related" (a binary on/off) with specific tax lines, which thus prevents the "bulk edit" I was mentioning. As you know, there are many tax line items that don't exist in Quicken.

Along these lines, regarding our tax-related categories, there are about 600 categories/sub-categories, and these are mainly for accounting purposes above and beyond taxes. We have been using Quicken year-'round, not just for tax season, so our categories are a little more granular. Work for several rainy days…

Additionally, since accountants charge by the hour for above-and-beyond, I wouldn't want to bring in a 400-page report and say "Here ya go!" to our accounting team.

Why should our accountants slog through what Quicken is supposed to help doing?

jacobs

@earshot  Just to make sure we're on the same page, are you talking about importing form Quicken 2016 to Quicken subscription, or are you talking about importing from the old Quicken 2007? I have not heard of any major issues that you're describing between Quicken 2016 and the current version; the default categories are the same. (Quicken 2007 to Quicken subscription is a different matter.)

Tax-line settings will only be in place for Quicken's built-in categories. If you import from Quicken 2007, investment transactions are mapped correctly, but other income/expense categories will not come in with any tax-related status. A I mentioned earlier, you can either merge your old categories into Quicken's default ones, or add tax-related status to any categories you wish to retain.

Wow, 600 categories?! That's a remarkable number of categories. Even my chart of accounts at work has never approached that number; many very large companies don't have that number. (It's off-topic here, but I wonder whether tags could significantly reduce the number of sub-categories you have.) And a 400-page report of transactions in a year? I'd venture that also surpasses 99% of Quicken users. Although I'd note that for an accountant pulling tax-related numbers, a summary report should suffice with a much smaller number of pages.

In any case, yes, I think you have a few hours of work to set up the tax-related status of your large number of categories. Fortunately, it should be a one-time set-up issue.

You also asked about memorize transactions, which is a different matter than categories. Quicken 2007, Quicken 2016, and current Quicken Mac have somewhat different approaches to memorized transactions. In Quicken 2016, any time you entered a transaction for a Payee, Quicken would fill in all the details (amount, category, memo, etc.) of the last transaction for that Payee. That changed when they implemented QuickFill rules. Not everyone liked the auto-fill of the older version, so now you can turn it on or off globally, and override it in a per-transaction basis. You can set QuickFill rules to fill in some fields and not others; you can lock them to be unchanging or let them update with future transactions. I think it's much more flexible and powerful. But it does take a little while to build up your "library" of QuickFill rules. I view it like the old highway construction signs: "temporary inconvenience; permanent improvement".