How do I reset the Turbo Tax link in the tax planner?

Question

I'm struggling with the tax planner, like every year.  The way it resets on January 1st causes a lot of confusion. In My Quicken it defaults to "TurboTax 1998" for several of the planner windows but not all.

I've tried to find a way to change that but have been unable to find one. For one thing I wonder why anyone would want the 1998 tax year as a starting point. By change it, I mean not default to the TurboTax option upon new year reset.

I've been using Quicken since the DOS days and now use the latest version with current updates.

Rocket J Squirrel · Answer

You're right that there seems no way to remove imported TT data once it's in the Q file. You'd have to do an export/import to an intermediate file format, which has problems of its own.

I recently did this and it wasn't as bad as I thought. I had a dozen or so obsolete accounts and my file was showing signs of corruption. I did a Validate, then File Copy, deleted all the obsolete accounts, did another File Copy, and ended up with a smaller file and the hope that some of the corruption was left behind. The only obvious remnant is that there are now transfers to and from "[Unspecified Account]" where the other side of the transfer was deleted. Those are old and don't bother me.

JohnC · Answer

Importing Turbo Tax file is not something I desire to use.  Quicken doesn't provide a way to easily clean up the data files. The files just keep getting bigger and loading takes longer.  Since the brokerages now provide all the information to import to Turbo Tax tying Turbo Tax back into Quicken doesn't seem efficient.

The "projected amount" isn't usually even close to actual amount. I am more interested in tracking income for current tax year so I can ensure that I have withheld enough to avoid a penalty.  I still have closed accounts that haven't been in use for 20 years, but it's a lot of work to manually clean it up.

I appreciate your help.

Rocket J Squirrel · Answer

Are you talking about the "(from year)" that appears as a choice as shown below? The displayed year shows the most recent TT data imported for that tax item. You should try updating it by importing your .tax2020 file into Quicken. But if there are items missing from that file, you may still see earlier years displayed.