Est. Tax Pymts (1040-ES) showing incorrectly in Tax Planner

ewoldde9

Early in January some of my stocks hit their stop-losses and I sold some stocks with 15 yrs of growth, so I made an tax payment. Since it is hard to predict income and expenses in January, I simply paid just under 20%. Later in the year I took a closer look at the projected tax balance and went thru all the items, adjusting the projections to get the best estimate. When I got to the page for tax payments (the last page), I found the payment was missing, so I entered it manually. The projected tax balance looked strange but all the numbers looked reasonable, even though the size of the refund seemed high. So in December when I took some losses, I also decided to take some profits to use up that projected refund. Now the refund was reduced.

However, when I went through all the pages again to tweak the projections, I stumbled on the payment from January included in the transaction list for federal withholding—by manually entering it on the Estimated Tax Payments page I had doubled it!

I went back to check the transaction, but I could not find any other way to categorize it except as Tax/Federal.

Have I missed something or do we need a new Category for Taxes/Federal/Est-Payments that will show up on the Tax Planner's Estimated Payments page? (Might also need a way to specify current/prior year.)

Jim_Harman

Quicken credits Federal Estimated Tax entered on January 15 or earlier to the prior tax year, because that is when the 4th payment is due. What date is the payment entered in Quicken? Did you include that payment in your 2022 tax return? If you want Quicken to credit the payment to the 2023 tax year, you must date it 1/16 or later.

Disclaimer: I am not a tax advisor. You should consult a real tax advisor to find out what to do if you made the payment before 1/16 and did not include it on your 2022 return..

volvogirl

When and how did you send it in? The 2023 first quarter estimate wasn't due until April 18. Better check your IRS account and make sure the payment got applied to 2023 estimates and not a 4th qtr 2022 payment. How to view your account at the IRS and see your payment history and payoff amount, etc.

https://www.irs.gov/uac/view-your-tax-account

ewoldde9

The payment was made in April, so the year should not be in doubt. (BTW, payments to IRS are made with the tax year specified.)

The trouble is that there does not seem to be a way to specify that a tax payment is for an estimate, so the Tax Planner has no way of ever picking up any thing to ever put into the fields on that page. It is fine to have it available to enter projected amounts, but it is misleading if previous payments are not reflected.

Jim_Harman

If you go to any of the detail pages in the Tax Planner, you can see what tax line items are captured on that form.

For example, click on Tax Payments then Estimated taxes paid to date. At the top of the detail section, click on "View tax form line items used here"

This shows that for me, the TaxFed:FedEst. uses the Form 1040:Federal estimated tax, qtrly tax line item. Thus any transaction that uses the Tax Fed:Fed est. Category will be included in this section.

ewoldde9

That shows that this line on the 1040 is associated with the Category "Tax Fed:Fed Est."

Except that there is no such category, which is my suggestion for a slight change. (Unless I create it myself.)

Rocket J Squirrel

Create the category yourself. The name of the category is unimportant. What is essential is that it is associated with the Tax Line Item as shown above (and below).

I personally use Taxes:FIT:Estimated for this, but that's just me. You be you.

Chris_QPW

There are many possible taxes/tax lines that might be assigned to a given category. Quicken "pre-creates" just the ones that they feel that the "average user" would need. If you are just a wage earner, then you wouldn't be paying estimated taxes.

ewoldde9

Yes, I can create it myself, but it seems that it would be a very small correction that would make this part of the Tax Planner work properly.

As for the "average user", I guess that anyone running a business, doing GIG work, or having investments with periodic capital gains (using the PREMIER version) must be above "average".

ewoldde9

One more thing: the same thing needs to be done for State Tax estimates, pointing to Schedule A, Est Taxes.

It does not apply to me, but it might also be needed for Local Taxes.

Rocket J Squirrel

Quicken's built-in categories are very sub-optimal. I presume they were created by a programmer who had never used Quicken in real life. A top level category of "Bills & Utilities" with a subcat of "Credit Card Payment" are built in and are supremely stupid.

There is no need to use the built-in categories (and you are free to delete them) if you have a category and tax line scheme you like better.

Jim_Harman

… but you should not try to mess with the investing categories that begin with _underscores. Note that these categories are hidden by default. To avoid confusion and reporting problems, you should un-hide any of the investing Categories that are used, particularly _DivInc, _IntInc, _ST CapGnDst, _LT CapGnDst, and _RlzdGain.

Also, if you think you might want to allow Quicken to assign Categories to downloaded credit card transactions automatically but you don't like the built-in names, you should re-name the corresponding built-in Categories rather than deleting them. [This is a topic for a different discussion]

ewoldde9

No, I would not change or delete any of them, even if I don't use them.

On another subject, I happened to notice that my RMD distribution from my IRA did not show up in the Tax Planner. (I had entered it manually as a Withdrawal, because I had never noticed that there was a special transaction for these taxable withdrawals.) I searched the Help provided but found nothing about how to record an IRA distribution, so I checked on-line here. I tried several things that did not work because I was trying to create a transaction from the IRA side.

I found your directions in the discussion, "Distributions from a beneficiary IRA" was very clear and simple—my new suggestion is to put that in the Help section of Q!

Jim_Harman

Quicken says they are working on improvements to handling IRA distributions. Hopefully we will see something soon, and it will be described accurately in the Help. See this lengthy Idea post. There is a nice summary at the very end.

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7864626/improve-handling-of-ira-distributions-including-qcds-and-roth-conversions

Chris_QPW

One more thing I will mention from what I have seen of the default categories. The first is that the "old ones" seem to have been created (and almost never changed) way back in the DOS era, and at that time, most people didn't have estimated taxes, and such. That goes for the tax lines too.

Then there are the "new categories". Basically, they were created right after Intuit bought Mint, and as such I'm pretty sure that is exactly were these came from. And at that time, Mint didn't even import investment transactions (I'm not sure if it ever did, but maybe long afterwards).

Quicken has tons of features that get neglected in what appears to be Quicken Inc's desire to add all the new features that people are or in some cases aren't even asking for, probably in the hopes of attracting new customers.