Why is Tax Planner for 2021 using 2020 data?

Cyclist

This was a discussion in the community that has been closed. I too (same as the original poster) have been a Quicken user for almost 30 years, and have learned to work around this issue, but it's still a hassle. If there is no data for a particular tax line for the tax year selected, Quicken should use 0. It makes no sense to disable (gray out) the selection "Quicken Data (from xxxx)" - where xxxx is the tax year selected in Tax Planner. If there are no transactions for the selected year for that particular tax line, the answer is 0. Perhaps it should be an option to use the prior year (or even whatever year last had data for this category prior to the tax year selected in Tax Planner), but the default should most definitely be the year selected. The absurdity of this can be seen (currently) by selecting 2020 as the Tax Year. This is HISTORICAL data ... the year is complete! And yet, when I look at the entry for "Wages and Salaries - Self", the only option I have is to utilize "User Entered" or "Turbo Tax (2005)" (where that comes from is a topic for another discussion??). Fortunately, the "Turbo Tax (2005)" entry is 0, so that works for me (as I have been retired for about 10 years). Where this problem really becomes apparent is at the beginning of a New Year. There are many tax categories that I WILL have entries for sometime within the new year, but NOT yet on Januray 1st. What Tax Planner does (until I actually have an actual transaction) is to utilize the prior years data (by default), which renders Tax Planner's data USELESS until I actually have an actual transaction. I've circumvented this for years by placing a dummy transaction dated 12/31/xx (where xx is the current year) with a category (using split feature) for every category that I might potentially use in Tax Planner set to $0.01. This is an inconsequential amount with respect to Tax Planning, and forces Tax Planner to utilize current year data. While this works, it's a stupid thing to have to do, when the code and UI should just be altered to use (by default) the year selected in Tax Planner, and to use 0 is there if no data (yet?).

BTW - what I do every year is just alter the date of my "dummy" transaction, making it 12/31 for the new current year. Thinking about this, it actually means my prior year would then be potentially incorrect, as there most definitely are $0.01 entries on tax categories that really had 0, which will then default to data from a prior year (<= 2019) or something else (TurboTax 20xx?????). Guess I should copy that dummy transaction to the prior year! Anyhow, you shouldn't have to do this.

Chris_QPW

Yeah, I agree this is wrong.  Personally what I have done is go through and select User Entered in these cases or like you said been lucky that the TurboTax number is zero (I haven't imported that since 2009).

I wonder what it defaults to if TurboTax has never been imported.

TurboTax for a year that is older than last year should never be the default.

Cyclist

Chris - thx for enlightening me on the source of the TurboTax data. Guess last time I imported that was in 2005. This really seems like it ought to be an easy fix (probably more UI programming than logic, depending on what alternate choices (like what if I WANT to use last years totals) are made available o/t User Entered). I've utilized User Entered as well (in the past), but this necessitates periodically running thru and changing once "real" data for the selected year is available. Really wish they would fix this, as tax planning throughout the year is a major concern for me (and I'm assuming others as well).

Chris_QPW

Yes, it seems me that the "defaulting" logic needs a bit of a tweak, and the disabling of the current year seems wrong too.

I can certainly see the logic flow.

If I don't have any current transactions, but I have TurboTax data from last year, then yes, most likely what I want for the default is the TurboTax data.  But I don't want it if it is years old, and there isn't any way to clear it out once you have imported one time.

On the disabling of selecting the current transactions.  Yes you don't have any transactions, but as you pointed out that is probably exactly what the user wants, as in "current as zero".

This is for the use case where you had this tax line/transactions last year, but not this year, (and you didn't import TurboTax data).