I am brand new to Quicken and to Bookkeeping

RC_5280

I am trying to do the bookkeeping and taxes myself.
I just downloaded the Quicken - Manage Your Home & Business software.
I figured out how to connect my banks / Credit Cards both personal and business.
Now I am a bit stuck on what to do next to get my info ready to send over to my TurboTax to process my taxes.
Any help and suggestions would be much appreciated....

Greg_the_Geek

You don't send your information to TurboTax. TurboTax will import it from Quicken.

Chris_QPW

Have you categorized all those transactions?
Do you have the full year of transactions?

Ps56k2

RC_5280 said: I am trying to do the bookkeeping and taxes myself.

well... there are several steps you need .... In general ....

1 - The banks will only download about 90 days of transactions...
how will you get a FULL YEAR of transactions to reflect your personal and business ?

2 - Each transaction should be associated with a Quicken Category -
either automatically or manually setup by YOU.
These Categories then flow into various Tax Line Assignments - for your Quicken Reporting or other TTax input

3 - You of course should then review the Quicken Tax Planner to see how things look.

4 - Anything related to your business will be unique to you and has to be setup in Quicken to reflect this business -

5 - You can later bring up TTax and ask it to "Import" data from your Quicken data file....

Lastly - remember - Garbage in = Garbage out
without proper and correct Category assigments, the transactions are either correct, wrong, or lost

Chris_QPW

I going to add this.  With the exception of any expenses that can't be determined in a different way, like say some business expenses, I would never do what you are attempting to do.

It is much more efficient to do your taxes in your tax program this year than to try to get everything correct in Quicken just so you can import it into TurboTax.  Mostly what TurboTax needs is totals that will be on your 1099s and such.  It is the 1099s and such that are "official" Quicken's numbers aren't.  I might have to get 100 transactions categorized (with the tax lines correct) to get one number on a 1099, which I can just manually enter instead of importing it.

It is might a different story if you had started 2021 with Quicken, and over the year carefully recorded your expenses and such but trying to do this for a whole year just before taxes just to import some numbers into TurboTax is going to be a whole lot more work than just trying to get the numbers determined in different ways, like getting a report from you credit card account(s).

But like I said the exception might be business expenses that you really can't get a good report on any other way.  In that case I would concentrate on getting those transaction properly categories.  And only import those, or even just generate a report for entering them into your tax program.

I might add that if there is a choice between say importing from your financial institution, and Quicken, you want to go with importing from the financial institution.

Quicken is great for giving you visibility into your finances, and as good check of the numbers coming into your taxes, but it really requires that you have done it throughout the year to really do a good job of it.

volvogirl

Are you using Turbo Tax Desktop installed program or the Online web version?  Did you enter all your 2021 transactions?

You can only import Quicken into the Windows Desktop program.

https://ttlc.intuit.com/community/entering-importing/help/how-do-i-import-from-quicken-into-turbotax-cd-download-basic-deluxe-premier-or-home-business-for/00/26389 

Ps56k2

RC_5280 said: I am trying to do the bookkeeping and taxes myself..

As @Chris_QPW mentioned - you have to look at the reality...

I usually use TTax and Import my Quicken data as soon as I get TTax installed & updated in January.
However - the actual 1099 info is not yet avail - so for me, the Quicken data is merely a ballpark...
I then, later when avail, Import the 1099 data into TTax directly from each financial institution - concrete numbers.

INCOME -
Quicken will have this data, and it might be "close" - but it will not be complete...
So, you need the actual 1099 so that your 1040 will match the 1099 - and not match just what Quicken says...
Some examples might be 1099 Divs... Ordinary Divs vs the Qualified Divs portion - which Quicken can't provide.
Also, other subtle incomes.... from REIT and 995 rules - and any Foreign Tax paid, etc -

EXPENSE -

Some of these will be defaults within Quicken - but if you have a business - Quicken can't do anything without having all the transactions entered and put into their respective Categories.

SO - what kind of business....