Add sales tax to line items

kenish

When entering a receipt with many items with different Quicken categories, some items have state sales tax and others do not (e.g. typical Costco receipt). Receipts only show if an item is taxable and the total sales tax charged. This requires calculating sales tax for each taxable item when entering the receipt.

Recommend adding a feature to specify sales tax rate as a Setting. When entering the price of each item, clicking a "Taxable" button adds sales tax to the price.

Note: This is different than a separate category for sales tax, which I do not need to track.

NotACPA

In many states, items are taxed at differing rates.

SO, what you ask is just this side of impossible.

How can Q possibly accomodate the multiple rates in multiple states?

rismanma

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20351769#Comment_20351769

One possibility could be:

Add a "sales tax jurisdiction" list, as another list like Securities and Currencies

The list would be a list of Sales Tax Jurisdiction

Customer populates their own Sales Tax Jurisdiction.

Under each Sales Tax Jurisdiction, Customer enters sales tax rates, along with optional start and end dates for each

Start date blank means forever in the past. End date blank means forever in the future.

No overlapping of date ranges allowed for any one Sales Tax Jurisdiction.

In register transaction, add a button, like @kenish, suggests, to request sales tax be applied. Or something similar to a button, which provides this functionality

Pushing the button should allow the customer to choose a Sales Tax Jurisdiction

When a Sales Tax Jurisdiction is applied, the Transaction's date should be used to choose the correct rate for that jurisdiction, from among the ones the customer entered

If the customer chooses to apply a Sales Tax Jurisdiction, but has not entered a rate for corresponding to the date of the Transaction, Quicken should disallow it.

Bonus feature: allow the customer to mark one of the Jurisdictions as the default one (probably this would be the one where they live or shop the most). I say "bonus" but I think this really should be included.

For split transactions, each split line should have this button/feature to apply a Sales Tax Jurisdiction

Bonus feature: for Memorized Payees, allow the customer the option of adding a default Sales Tax Jurisdiction for any Memorized Payee. There's one drawback to this — when the payee is, say, a large retail business chain and the customer frequently visits them in different states/cities. I'm not sure how to handle that; perhaps they would have to just pick one

In Registers, Quicken should still display the base amount, without sales tax applied. Note that this means that the running balance in the registers might look like they don't add up, since if you have, say, a 5% tax rate and a running balance of $100, and the user adds a $10 spending transaction, the register would show $100 balance, -$10 transaction, and then $89.50 running balance. If this would be confusing to the user, then apply a color or shading or icon or something similar, to the taxed amount.

In Reports, Quicken should show the amount with tax applied.

Bonus feature: Add both non-tax-applied amount and tax-applied amount as individual choices for columns in Reports

If the customer edits a sales tax rate, then any existing open registers or reports should automatically update, just like Reports currently do when a customer modifies transactions

Bonus feature: Add a sales-tax-applied-amount as one of the options in the Find dialog. The existing Amount field would continue to be the base (non-tax-applied) amount

Bonus feature: Add sales-tax jurisdiction as one of the options for replacement in the Find and Replace feature

Bonus feature: Add a line item to the existing Tax Line Item feature for Schedule A: General Sales Taxes, and automatically (and transparently?) apply this to every transaction and split line which is marked as having sales tax. Note that the customer might already have tax line items on this transaction (for example, an expense could be a charitable contribution, a medical expense, etc, and also have sales tax applied), so this is why it might have to be transparent and not subject to the usual rule of applying only one Tax Line Item at a time to any transaction/split item.

Note — I kind of wish Currencies worked more like this currently

NotACPA

Do you have any idea how many tax jurisdictions are in my state alone??? Let alone the multiplicity of rates on differing items in each of those jurisdictions?

Groceries, for example, have 95 different tax rates in my state.

I repeat "just this side of impossible"

Rocket J Squirrel

The complexity of this suggestion - and the lack of any clear reason why it's needed - boggle my mind. I can travel to the next town and their sales tax rate is different than in my town. Imagine translating that into program code.

However, I do track sales tax as one number per receipt. This is in hopes that one day the SALT deduction cap will be lifted (currently scheduled for 2026, I think?). I can't imagine wanting to track sales tax for each individual item.

Jim_Harman

Perhaps someone could explain why it is necessary to track sales tax per item. Isn't the deduction based on total sales tax paid?

Jon

@Jim_Harman If I'm understanding OP correctly, they didn't want to track sales tax as a category, they just wanted to make it easier to spread the sales tax amount on the receipt across the different categories that it might have. For example, if I go to Walmart & spend $30 on a pair of jeans, $20 on a Blu-ray, and $25 on groceries, and the groceries are tax free, I would want to split the sales tax up 60/40 between the Clothing and Entertainment purchases and apply none of it to Food.

Rocket J Squirrel

I understand you, @Jon.

This idea is absurd. Sales tax is a tax. It is not part of the cost of an item and it should not be allocated to different categories according to what was bought. That distorts the actual costs of items.

Jon

@Rocket J Squirrel I can see your point, but personally I have no interest in tracking sales tax as a separate category. I don't deduct sales taxes on my tax return as property income tax is the better deduction, so that number is useless to me.

Rocket J Squirrel

OK, regardless of the utility, or lack thereof, of this idea, it would complicate the heck out of Quicken for the 2 users who have voted for it.

Jon

I agree, I'm not advocating for this & wouldn't vote for it if I was a QWin user. In Missouri, where tax rates vary from one city to the next - and even within a city depending on what store you're shopping at - as well as having different tax rates depending on the item purchased, it could never work.

Chris_QPW

Instead of this pipe dream I suggest you look into memorizing your payees as split with tax as a percentage.

jacobs

If you just want to apply a particular tax rate to split lines, what you're asking for is a feature which existed in the legacy Quicken Mac 2007 (and which we Mac users are still waiting/hoping to be implemented in the re-written Quicken Classic Mac).

This feature was called Quick Math, and it was very simple. It allowed users to assign keyboard characters to a simple math operation — which almost everyone used for applying sales taxes. I live in southeastern Pennsylvania, so depending on where I'm shopping, I might pay 6% Pennsylvania sales tax, 8% Philadelphia sales tax, or 6.625% New Jersey Sales tax. In the Quick Math setup screen, I'd assign the letter 't' to do * 1.06 for Pennsylvania sales tax, 'p' to do '* 1.08" for Philadelphia sales tax, and 'n' to do "* 1.06625" for New Jersey Sales tax. In any amount field, I'd just enter the base amount and a letter, e.g. $10 with Pennsylvania sales tax would be entered as '10t', and the amount would be $10.60 (10 * 1.06). If I had a store purchase with $50 of taxable household items and $30 of tax-free clothing, I could enter a split with Category=Clothing, Amount=30 and another with Category=Household, Amount 50t (which would become $53.00). If the purchase was in Philadelphia, I'd just enter 50p (which would become $54.00).

Note that the tax value isn't stored anywhere, and isn't categorized separately. It's simply a user interface shortcut to allow user to apply one for multiple different tax rates when desired. (You could also do other simple math, so if you could get a 2% cash payment discount you could assign that to a key. If you routinely divide a purchase amount three different Tags, you could assign a key to "/3".) This little feature would do exactly what @kenish wants.

smayer97

Agreed… A MUCH BETTER and SIMPLER solution is what QM2007 has had for a LONG TIME. QuickMath… assign a math calculation to a key or key sequence and when on a line item, the key/sequence makes a calculation…

VOTE for this SUPER USEFUL feature! (This IDEA thread already exists in the QMac section of this forum, and is PLANNED).

QWin IDEA thread: QuickMath for QWin