Roth 401K Workaround stopped working correctly

Drinkingbird

Since Quicken still doesn't support Roth 401Ks, the workaround in the Paycheck wizard has been to enter a pre-tax 401K contribution of $0 in order to get the employer match field to show up, then enter an after-tax item for the employee Roth contribution.  This didn't work consistently up until a couple years ago when it started being a reliable workaround.  Now, with the most recent update, existing checks still show the workaround, but any new check entered, the account disappears from the $0 transaction and I get a notice of an uncategorized transaction.  If I go back into an old paycheck and hit "enter" without changing anything, the account disappears from that one too.

If there are no plans to support Roth 401k soon please at least restore the functionality that allowed the workaround.

Drinkingbird

Actually it is even worse than I thought, it has reverted to the unreliable state from a couple years ago where the transfers into the 401K account randomly disappear and/or have the wrong memo on them.  This only started with the most recent big update a few days ago.

Drinkingbird

Can anyone from quicken comment or forward this to the development teams?  This was the only way to track Roth 401K with employer match since quicken does not support Roth 401K

imdcareys

This is happening to me as well. I have put 1 cent into the memorized contribution to work around this new issue. I know that Quicken will likely take a long time to fix this, so I intend to change the 1 cent back to zero each time I enter a paycheck. Not sure if the 401k account will stick when I save the entry though.

Quicken - we need this to work so the employer match gets saved to the 401k account, since - as Drinkingbird stated - you do not appear to intend supporting Roth 401k accounts.

Drinkingbird

imdcareys said:

This is happening to me as well. I have put 1 cent into the memorized contribution to work around this new issue. I know that Quicken will likely take a long time to fix this, so I intend to change the 1 cent back to zero each time I enter a paycheck. Not sure if the 401k account will stick when I save the entry though.

Quicken - we need this to work so the employer match gets saved to the 401k account, since - as Drinkingbird stated - you do not appear to intend supporting Roth 401k accounts.

Nah that was the first thing I tried, once you change it to 0 and save, the transfer account disappears and the uncategorized transaction warning shows up.

Investment accounts don't support $0 transactions but this workaround was working for quite a while, apparently the $0 transfer wasn't blocked, but now it is.

To make matters worse if I go back into my old paychecks (where the workaround worked) not only does the transfer get removed but the remaining transfers in the 401K account get all messed up.  Wrong comment, or get deleted completely messing up the balance.

I guess technically the current way it is working is fine, I don't need the $0 transfer to show in the 401K account, just annoying seeing the "uncategorized transaction" warning and when you click it, not getting any real info on it.

imdcareys

If you are getting an employer match, how are you getting that to work without the account in your paycheck?

Drinkingbird

imdcareys said:

If you are getting an employer match, how are you getting that to work without the account in your paycheck?

My saved paycheck reminder transaction has the account in it, and it shows when entering the transaction.  It is only after saving the transaction that the account disappears from the $0 line item.  So the employer match does transfer correctly to the 401K account, I guess that happens before the account is removed (or in reality, the $0 transaction is rejected by the investment account).

However if you go back in and edit that paycheck transaction and save it again, it can cause some funky issues, one of the transfers sometimes disappears, then save it again it comes back but has the wrong memo on it, etc.  

This is how it used to work (badly) up until a year or two ago then the workaround started working perfectly, even if you edited the paycheck several times and saved it, everything was fine.   But the recent big update a couple weeks ago reverted back to that old behavior.

For now I'm still using it, I rarely need to edit a paycheck transaction and am ignoring the "uncategorized transactions" warnings.  I'm hoping they can either fix it so this workaround goes back to working again or finally start supporting Roth 401K, shouldn't be that hard to implement after this many years.

imdcareys

Based on what you said, I saved the memorized paycheck with a zero amount in the contribution and the matching amount in the employer match along witht the 401k account. Then I didn't open it back up in edit mode for verification.  I posted the paycheck and it posted the match to the 401k account and the zero contribution without the account (uncategorized).

I could be OK with that for a while and ignore the uncategorized part until I find time to deal with support.

Thanks!

Drinkingbird

imdcareys said:

Based on what you said, I saved the memorized paycheck with a zero amount in the contribution and the matching amount in the employer match along witht the 401k account. Then I didn't open it back up in edit mode for verification.  I posted the paycheck and it posted the match to the 401k account and the zero contribution without the account (uncategorized).

I could be OK with that for a while and ignore the uncategorized part until I find time to deal with support.

Thanks!

You actually can open and edit the scheduled transaction/reminder, just not the actual transactions once entered into your register, that is when problems arise.  You can open the actual transactions, just not save them (even if you make no changes) or you'll probably notice things get messed up in the 401K account.

For the roth portion, I just add an after tax item that says "Employee ROTH Contribution" or whatever and put the same 401K account as the category.

sjtideman

I have a standard 401K (not a Roth) and for my last two bi-weekly paychecks (so about a month ago) it started giving me an 'uncategorized transaction' note on my home page. I couldn't see what was causing it until I created a report, and realized it was from the paycheck, and from the Employer Match. There seems to be no place to categorize it. So something changed recently that is affecting more than this one workaround.

Drinkingbird

sjtideman said:

I have a standard 401K (not a Roth) and for my last two bi-weekly paychecks (so about a month ago) it started giving me an 'uncategorized transaction' note on my home page. I couldn't see what was causing it until I created a report, and realized it was from the paycheck, and from the Employer Match. There seems to be no place to categorize it. So something changed recently that is affecting more than this one workaround.

Interesting, when I went into the report for uncategorized transactions, it was also blank but somewhere in it was mention of my company, which prompted me to look at my paycheck, and noticed the transfer account was now being removed from the $0 transfer.  My company match and after tax contribution are both working fine.

Hopefully it is a bigger bug and both issues will get fixed, once this workaround started working I went back and edited a lot of checks going back a few years to use it (so I could separately track my Roth and Traditional 401K contributions).

I do 6 months a year Roth and 6 months traditional.  In reality, I could just do half my contribution to roth and half to traditional for the entire year, but the way my 401K tracks it that would result in a bunch of extra transactions every paycheck, so that's why I do it the way I do.  

Charles George

I have this issue too on the Windows version since around early/mid November.

I had a Roth contribution setup as a post tax deduction, and a pre tax 401k contribution for the match, with a $0 contribution amount and the match amount from the Roth contribution in the employer amount there (since my employer matches Roth contributions with traditional 401k contributions).

The current actual behavior I saw was that the match transaction no longer appears in the 401k account for transactions entered after October 2022, and the match transaction shows as uncategorized transactions in various reports and screens. I have noticed that when you edit the paycheck reminders transactions, the destination account from the pre tax deduction dialog is blank, and does not save when you re-edit them. The expected behavior is that the pre tax employer match amount is categorized as _401EmployerContrib income and that match amount goes into my 401k account after the transaction is entered, despite the employee contribution amount being 0. At a minimum if this use case isn't supported, the system should give an error when you try to enter the transaction or when you setup the pre tax contribution. It shouldn't just ignore what was entered and change the value without telling the user.

The workaround I am using, which I think gives the desired end result for now, is to add a new income line into the paycheck of category _401EmployerContrib, in the amount of half the actual employer contribution, then deduct that same amount as a pre tax employee contribution, with the other half going into the employer box. I think it just needs to have a non zero amount in both the contribution and employer boxes to work properly.

Quicken please please please fix this bug as soon as possible or better yet can you formally start supporting Roth contributions. My guess is this was broken by the fix in R45.7 (November 2022):

"Inability to delete blank investment transactions related to a paycheck"

imdcareys

A couple of follow up questions...

1. Has anyone reported this directly to Quicken Support?
2. Does anyone know what version update broke the workaround?

Thanks

Drinkingbird

It was whatever version came out right before I posted, so early november.  It was a big update that added a lot of stuff (according to the release notes anyway).  There has been one or two small updates since then but the issue still persists.

I was hoping someone from Quicken would notice in here as they usually do drop in on these threads, I don't like reporting via the app as it requires you to send a lot of stuff.

BillOKeefe

I noticed the same problem around the middle of November. On the Main View screen, I could see there were three Uncategorized TXs, and I could tell they were related to my Paychecks, but there was visibility beyond that. However, on the Dashboard screen, if you hover over each entry and click on the pencil icon that is displayed, you will see that the uncategorized $0 was related to my employer contribution to my Roth 401k, since it had reached the max for the year. I was able to manually enter _401EmployerContrib for the category, and now the warnings on the Main View no longer appear. See attached screenshots Not a solution, but at least a way to workaround the problem until it is fixed.

Drinkingbird

BillOKeefe said:

I noticed the same problem around the middle of November. On the Main View screen, I could see there were three Uncategorized TXs, and I could tell they were related to my Paychecks, but there was visibility beyond that. However, on the Dashboard screen, if you hover over each entry and click on the pencil icon that is displayed, you will see that the uncategorized $0 was related to my employer contribution to my Roth 401k, since it had reached the max for the year. I was able to manually enter _401EmployerContrib for the category, and now the warnings on the Main View no longer appear. See attached screenshots Not a solution, but at least a way to workaround the problem until it is fixed.

Yeah the report was confusing until I hovered over something and saw my employer and that's what pointed me to the paycheck.  I noticed the same thing, the category just blanks out.  In my case this workaround won't work as it will cause the employer match not to transfer (I'm not maxed out).

It is odd that even though the category blanks out after entering, the employer match still transfers.  However I think if you then open and save the paycheck again without re-entering the category, the employer match disappears from the transfer account too.

imdcareys

@System has created a new thread based on this one. You can find it here: https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7925870/traditional-401k-zero-employer-match-issue

imdcareys

Quicken Jasmine noted that this has been reported in this thread: https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20324224#Comment_20324224