Paycheck Setup wizard, where is it?

Shan

Want to track my paycheck and fed/state tax withholdings as well as taxes paid (and year, estimated taxes)

Quicken Anja

Hello @Shan,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community with your question.

Quicken for Mac, unfortunately, does not currently offer this feature. Therefore, I'd like to refer you to this active Idea post regarding this topic instead which is currently marked as Planned. If you would like to be notified of updates on this feature as they become available, you can go ahead and bookmark the thread by clicking the yellow star on the top-right corner.

Our Development and Product teams frequently use our idea posts in order to improve Quicken and implement new features requested by customers. 

I hope this helps!

Shan

Without a wizard, how would one use Q(mac) track paychecks, fed/state/SS tax withholdings?
Track taxes paid for the correct year??

Quicken Anja

Shan said:

Without a wizard, how would one use Q(mac) track paychecks, fed/state/SS tax withholdings?
Track taxes paid for the correct year??

By creating a split transaction in the register. Please, refer to this Help Article for more information and instructions on creating split transactions.

Additionally, being that you are a new user, I would also like to inform you that you do have the option to schedule a one-on-one tour with our Quicken 1-2-3 team. 

By doing so, one of our Quicken 1-2-3 team members will contact you via phone at your scheduled appointment time. This team has been specifically trained and put together to assist our new customers in getting familiarized with the program and learn how to utilize it to fit your needs, as well as answer any questions and/or address any concerns you may have.

If this is something that would interest you, then please, click here to select a time slot and schedule your tour! Alternatively, you can also call them directly at your own convenience. The phone number can be found through that same link.

I hope this helps!

jacobs

@Shan Let me add a couple comments. Quicken Windows users are often aghast that there is no paycheck wizard in Quicken Mac, but it's truly not as big an omission as it might at first seem. (I'd also note that the developers have stated they plan to add a paycheck wizard in the future to parallel Quicken Windows, but we have no idea when that might appear.) 

The way to do it is to create the transaction once, using your paycheck stub, and then schedule the transaction to recur on whatever schedule you get paid. Let's walk through it…

• Start a new transaction
• Enter a Payee name like "My Paycheck" or "Deposit (Paycheck)" or "Companyname Pay" or whatever appears on your bank statement if your checks are received via Direct Deposit.
• Enter the amount of your net pay as the Amount or Deposit value. (If you show the Amount column, make sure Quicken makes this a positive value; if you instead use the Payment and Deposit columns, enter the amount in the Deposit column.)
• Open Splits (Shortcut: Command-Option-S)
• For the first split, enter the category you use for your Income. If you're using Quicken's default categories, this would be Personal Income:Paycheck. Or any other category/subcategory you create. (The Amount here is a positive number.)
• Tab to jump to the second split line, where you want to start recording your deductions. (It's best to enter the deductions in whatever order they appear on your paycheck stub, so you'll always be able to quickly make changes in Quicken when comparing to your stub; there's no way to re-order the splits in a transaction.) So select Taxes:Federal Tax, for instance, and enter that amount. (It should automatically be a negative number; you don't need to type the minus sign.) 
• Tab again, and Quicken will open a third split line. Enter the next deduction category, such as Taxes:Soc Sec, Tab to Amount, enter the deduction amount.
• Tab again to open the next split line. Continue entering deductions like this until you are done and you have no remainder amount.
• Save the transaction.

Here's a dummy paycheck entry to show what that would look like.



That's it. If you save this as a QuickFill transaction, then to enter your next paycheck, simply create a new transaction, enter the same Payee name, and Quicken will use the previous transaction to fill in the amount and all the splits. Done.

Or… click on the transaction, and click on the Schedule icon on the bottom menu bar. Select "Schedule selected transaction" from the pop-up menu. Click Next under Other Bill or Income, click Next on the Transaction Details screen, and on the Schedule Income Reminder screen, set the schedule to match your pay. You may need to click the little arrow to the start of the starting date so Quicken shows several additional scheduling options. If you get paid every other week, for instance, you can schedule the transaction for Every 2 Weeks. Or Twice a Month if you get paid bi-monthly -- and select the dates of pay. Or monthly, or whatever schedule you get paid. Each time you actually get paid, the transaction will be in your register waiting for you, and you can click the Deposited icon in the bottom menu bar to post the transaction. 

Set up like this, you'll  spend 5 seconds on each paychecks one you enter the transaction once. (Some payroll providers keep the amounts the same and only make changes once a quarter or at the end of the year for rounding; some payroll providers may have 1¢ or 2¢ variations from check to check, so if yours does that, you may have to change the net pay and one or more splits to match the paycheck -- 15 seconds instead of 5. )

Chris_QPW

Here is a bit of “prospective” on the idea that you have to have a paycheck reminder (from a Windows user that does have it).

First off in reality all the paycheck reminder does is create a split transaction.  You can even “copy it” and get that underline split transaction.

Next the wizard comes at a cost.  The first thing one might notice is that they got “lazy” on the scheduling.  The paycheck reminder lacks a lot of different scheduling, not to mention the ability to have a starting/ending dates for people that don’t have the same paycheck for the whole year (Teachers/contract workers).

Also recently there was a bug introduced (and maybe fixed much later) that for some reason only affected transactions entered by the paycheck reminder when using sync to cloud.  They would lose the spits information.

And another problem that was hitting me for every week entering my wife’s paycheck.  She works hourly so none of her paychecks are exactly the same.  So I entered them in changing amounts on the splits as I go.  Well in the wizard they separate out the employee contribution from the employer contribution, and the only way to get to the employer contribution is by clicking on an Edit button to pull up a separate dialog.  This “interrupts” the flow of just typing in the numbers.  I asked for years for them to change it so that you can just tab to it and edit, but it has never been changed.

Could all of these things be fixed?
Certainly.
Have they? 
No.

Why not.  My basic guess is that there are so many features in Quicken and people want more and more the developers just don’t have the time to fix them.  It is sort of like “well it has been like that for years, it must be ‘workable’”.

Bottom line is that every such feature complicates the program and the maintenance. Even when people think that getting a wizard is going make everything less complicated.