Link Paycheck data from payroll systems to income area in Bills and Income (Q Mac)
Major Payroll systems like ADP, Workday, PayCom, onPay, Rippling, Gusto, etc have an "employee" portal for users to retrieve their paycheck and W2. Why can't Quicken incorporate this to their income section?
It would be an extremely useful feature to have that information connect to the income area in Quicken. Like the bills area, it would flow thru the transactions and save a copy of the paycheck (like some bills do). Moreover, that the data could tell you Gross amount, Net Amount (which would go to the transactions page and match with paychecks), taxes, deductions, possible memos codes. This would also help with knowing how much a user's income was spent on healthcare or taxes
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I'd also like this for Quicken Windows.
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@DevopsJames Then you need to post a suggestion over in one of the Windows Ideas forums - this suggestion is for Quicken Mac.
Quicken Mac subscription. Quicken user since 1990.
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I understand the desire for this feature for people who have different pay amounts each paycheck — but it seems to me it would be difficult to accomplish. Paychecks in different states and municipalities have all sorts of different deductions, and I don't know how Quicken could map all of them to categories in Quicken. Some are universal: Social Security and Medicare. Some are somewhat common, such as state income tax withholding, and unemployment tax. What about state disability deduction. Family leave deduction? Union dues? Pension contribution? Medical? Dental? Vision? Earned income tax? Etc. The list of potential deductions is long, and Quicken doesn't have default categories for every one. And each payroll company has different labels they might use for deductions. Quicken would need to download a paycheck, and then ask you what Quicken category each deduction maps to, and allow you to create categories which may not exist.
But before that, of course, because there is no national standard for this, Quicken would need to contact each payroll provider and negotiate a contract and technical agreement. And then code the login protocol or API for connecting to each provider's server. I don't think Quicken, a company with about 200 employees, has the staff resources to tackle a project like that. I'm also skeptical each payroll provider company would be keen on allowing a third-party application to connect and download data for thousands of customers at once.
Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 19930 -
@jacobs I agree with you that there is a lot of variables to keep in mind when considering a paycheck. However, I worked in Payroll with variuous systems and had to deal with third parties that needed payroll data in various different ways (like company sponsored benefits). I can say with certainty, the payroll data is there and available to use (companies like plaid and and mx already have code for this).
As for the mapping, that ownership could be on the user. A Paystub, in the simplest sense, is just gross MINUS Deductions to get to the net and the metadata in any payroll system will group any pay codes into one of those categories. The user could could be the one to map out or reconcile what is under is gross (if you want pay codes to be imported), under deductions (pre-tax deductions, taxes, and post-tax deductions), under net (and what account it should be applied to), and under memo codes (if you want to see things like 401k company match). Not all users may want to see the same level of detail - some may want to group (all healthcare grouped), others may want to see only the gross/deductions/net and not broken down. Either way that would be up on the user to map/create categories for income specific.
As for cost, I see that as a non-issue. Many Payroll systems allow terminated employees to view their paystubs at no cost. Payroll systems will keep employee pay stubs and w2s for a number of years. If there is a cost, then it would be an API cost. But, all I see is a quicken user getting their paystub data in same matter that they register/link a bill/account in quicken - via user login credentials and possible secondary verification. Also, not all bills/accounts are linked in quicken. Quicken does not have 100% of all existing bills/accounts as a linkable account. The same can be done with the income - you can have a schedule (which semi works in quicken) and a template of whats on your paystub (gross, deductions, net).
This is all to say that I think the income section in quicken is weak - it is really only user friendly for net figures and that one net going to one account. From a high level, paychecks show that your money moves. Some of it goes to your checking account (or multiple checking/savings). Some of it goes to your retirement account. Some of it goes to a benefit account (HSA, FSA, etc). Maybe there's a garnishment and you want to check that. A starting place would be to build out the income section more.
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This is all to say that I think the income section in quicken is weak - it is really only user friendly for net figures and that one net going to one account.
If you’re paid a regular salary, then it’s simple to create a scheduled transaction with your gross salary and all your deductions — including any transfers to other accounts (such as 401k). Then there’s no work at all each pay day. (If you get paid different amounts each payday, then a scheduled transaction is still worthwhile for setting up all your splits and transfers, but you need to adjust the amounts each time.)
Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 19930 -
This only works if you have a single paycheck that goes to one account.
If your paycheck is split into multiple accounts, you would have to create multiple instances for each account or have a parent account that transfers out that money to the other accounts. That looks like a false transfer for the sake of reconciling.
The Deductions end up looking weird because those transactions would have to be grouped to an account where it never went (example - deducted taxes never hit your checking account). Some users may not want to see transactions that didnt actually happen under an account.
As for pay schedules. Yes, I agree most of the time Quicken can handle projected pay dates. To play devils advocate, some pay schedules do not align with what quicken has. Quicken assumes that user is paid on a certain day of the week in an interval or on a certain day in an interval. It doesn't allow exclusions of weekends or certain days of the week or holidays. What would be ideal is being able to input or adjust all known pay dates for the foreseeable future.
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This only works if you have a single paycheck that goes to one account. If your paycheck is split into multiple accounts, you would have to create multiple instances for each account or have a parent account that transfers out that money to the other accounts.
Very few people have their pay directed to two or more bank accounts. But if you do, yes, create one scheduled transaction for each account. As for deductions, your Quicken scheduled transactions should reflect what’s happening in the real world; there should not need to be any transfers.
Editing to add: I’m not opposed to or arguing against the original request here; I’m only offering my opinions that I think building out a data download standard with a variety of payroll service providers, as well as an approach to matching net deposit transactions from a bank with downloaded paycheck details data, would probably be an expensive commitment of development time for a somewhat small percentage of users who have complex or variable pay checks.
Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 19930 -
There was an article from Forbes.com ( ) stating the average American has more than one account.
But neither here or there. This forum is for ideas for under product enhancement. I am not arguing that there are ways to get around my idea - but those are workarounds and not fixes. I am simply stating that the income feature can be enhanced to include paystub information in a cleaner way - to include deductions and memos that aren't tied to your personal account(s), to have the option to split accounts (not transfer) and not just categories, to link certain transactions under the paystub to a different account (net or a deduction that went to a retirement account), adjust all pay dates for the foreseeable future. The metadata in the paystub could be used as an opportunity to analyze and monitor. As for the linking for the Payroll Provider - that is an ideal request. Quicken doesn't have to add it, but if one doesn't give all aspects of an idea, then it might not be considered.
Also noting the point regarding resources and cost to make this happen is not a fair point to make. I am not denying that this could be a lot of work and there could be a lot of cost, but this was stated under the ideas for Mac. There should be an air of "I have an idea I want to share regardless of cost and manpower to accomplish." I would assume that when an idea is posted, it should not have to consider if the idea is budget-friendly and cost effective.
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@A Brown You're correct: any suggestion for a feature improvement is absolutely fair ground to post here. It's intentional that the forum moderators have not provided an option in the voting to vote against an idea, so that every idea is free to develop its own momentum if it attracts fellow users who would like to see the idea implemented. As I wrote above in this thread, I am not opposed to or arguing against the original request here. My comments were offered with two goals: (1) offering my opinion about why I thought it might be difficult for this feature request to reach fruition, and (2) to offer some possible ways to make working with Quicken as easy as possible as long as no such feature exists.
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Before bowing out of this discussion, let me go back to touch on something you wrote most recently. You wanted to "link certain transactions under the paystub to a different account (net or a deduction that went to a retirement account)". I may not be understanding correctly, but a paycheck is a single transaction which can have as many splits as you want — and those split scan include transfers to a different account, such as a retirement account. Here's a mock paycheck entry where you can see the next-to-last line is a payroll deduction for a 401k contribution reflected as a transfer in Quicken to the 401k investment account:
This doesn't mean the 401k money was first created as a bogus deposit in the checking account and then transferred from checking to the 401k account; it means that the incoming deposit transaction accounts for the funds which were deposited into the 401k account.
Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 19930
