Adding a negative Pre-Tax Deduction

jrh404

My company is applying a $50 tax credit to my Pre-Tax deduction, which comes up on my paycheck as -$50 Quicken does not allow me to add this transaction: "You don't need to enter a negative amount for deduction. Quicken will handle it for you"

NotACPA

How does this $50 appear on your paystub? 

And, you might need to create a pseudo $50 income item (with no tax line assigned) and then an add'l $50 tax deduction ... which will result in a net $0 to your net pay.

jrh404

It appears as a -$50, which is how I wanted to enter it.
Thanks for your suggestion, that's what I ended up doing

John Mollman

The problem with entering these as an earning is that the W2 Gross calculations are now incorrect as the credit is counted as W2 gross income, which it isn't. Quicken really should support negative after-tax deductions. They aren't that uncommon (Stock award tax offsets), and how hard can it be to allow entering negative deductions?

NotACPA

John Mollman said:

The problem with entering these as an earning is that the W2 Gross calculations are now incorrect as the credit is counted as W2 gross income, which it isn't.

NOT if there's no tax line assigned to the category used.  It's the Tax line assigned to the category that determines if it appears on any tax report.