Does Tax planner deduct 401k and other before tax to calculate remaining tax?

mikek753b · January 14

hello,

Where I can see what Tax Planner deducts for tax calculations?

Where are 401k and HSA tax related deductions that have to lower AGI?

thanks

Chris_QPW · January 14

Wages → Expand the Details. In the "Quicken YTD Transactions and Scheduled Transactions" section the reduction for the 401K will be shown as a negative number.

mikek753b · January 14

thank you for the answer, but no

I don't see all 401k related transactions in the Tax Planner

yes, I see all expected 401k in the paycheck , just 401k and catch-up under Pre-tax Deductions

yes, the paycheck shows correct W2 Gross, which is less by those pre-tax deductions from total Earnings.

Looks like those 401k are not marked correctly to be treated as 401k contribution?

Chris_QPW · January 14

Are you using the Paycheck reminder to enter your paycheck?

It does special things in the background for this contribution.

mikek753b · January 14

yes, I setup Paycheck reminder that I Enter and merge with downloaded pay transaction and update related numbers.

Somehow I don't see expected _401Contrib under Taxable Income YTD, which I expect to see, and there no negative numbers for my 401k deductions ether.

in the Before Tax the Category is set to destination Fidelity 401k account.

mikek753b · January 14

Looks like Tax Planner doesn't understand 2 pre-tax 401k items?
In the paystub I have 2 401k items, plain and catch-up, so I set 2 in Quicken Paycheck

I see in Fidelity 401k account 2 expected xfer from the paycheck, but Tax Planner just doesn't see it.

Any ideas?

thanks

Chris_QPW · January 14

I'm not sure why the first 401K one isn't being entered. Did you enter it as the built-in one for that purpose:

I'm not surprised that the second/catch up one is missing, because Quicken doesn't know that it is a 401K contribution.

As you can see above, I tried entering a 401K catch up contribution and it didn't wipe out the regular contribution (and didn't show up in tax planner or the Taxable Income YTD).

Let me give you the crazy things that the paycheck reminder is doing and maybe something will click, but my initial guess would be with you didn't use the built-in 401K entry or that your paycheck reminder has somehow gotten corrupted and will need to be recreated.

I'm going to start with something that hasn't yet been mentioned, a contribution by your employer.

If you right click on a paycheck transaction in the register and select Add reminder you can drill into that to see the actual split that is created.

The way that one is handled is a transfer on one line and an offsetting line with the employer contribution category.

Now looking at lines 2 and 3 they are both just transfers. So, where is the magic for the line 2 showing up on the tax information?

If you go to a checking account and enter a transfer transaction where the "category" is exactly: [Tax Impact of 401(k) Accounts] and then right click on that transaction and select to go to the matching transfer you will end up in that hidden account.

What you should see there are a series of MiscEspX transactions:

Right clicking on the $15 most recent one and selecting to edit I get this:

Breaking this down. The category is the one that the tax reporting/tax planner is looking for. The "Transfer account" is the one we are in, which makes it a "balance adjustment" where the money "comes from outside of Quicken" (just appears in Quicken without affecting any other account).

Not surprising there isn't any entry for the "Catch-up".

One might be tempted to put a similar entry in the tax impact account for the catch-up, but that would be ill advised, and not automatic.

I think this paycheck entry even though it shows up a bit differently will fill the bill.

Tax planner:

Home tab YTD taxable income:

Frankx · January 14

Hi @mikek753b

The Tax Planner does not show all the details that one may want to see - especially for items that do not even appear on your tax forms like pre-tax deductions for 401-k's, etc.

Your 401-k deductions do not appear on your W-2 form because they are not taxable. Similarly, those amounts would not be expected to appear in tax software. But, assuming that you correctly enter (or download) your paycheck data into Quicken, that doesn't mean that those pre-tax deductions are not accounted for properly in Quicken generally or in the Tax Planner specifically. You should be able to test this by looking at the current data in your tax planner and comparing that with your YTD pay stubs.

Let me know if you have any followups.

Frankx

mikek753b · January 14

Thank you for the replies ;-)

it helps a lot, while it didn't fix completely my issue yet.

Should I drop this extra item to track 401k Catch-Up? Instead manually summarize both into single 401k item, if Quicken doesn't understand or support more then 1 item in the Pre-Tax as 401k _401Contrib ?
How I can adjust / edit existing Paycheck to track single 401k contribution to get expected hidden _401Contrib for Tax Planner proper tracking?

I got HSA transaction as negative in the Tax Planner, but so far I don't see in the YTD the Pre-Tax as 401k _401Contrib item.

Maybe this extra item Catch-401k up messed up expected tracking after some Quicken upgrade or etc, as sometime ago I think I saw YTD and Tax Planner to get 401k deductions correctly.

Chris_QPW · January 14

#1 I suspect that paycheck reminder is messed up somehow. Try recreating it. Having the Catch-Up as a separate line didn't mess up my test case, so I don't think it is something "built-in". On the other hand, you might prefer just putting in the one line, instead of doing it like I showed in my last comment. But you need to at least get to the point where the original 401K entry is doing the right thing in the tax entries.

#2 As for existing paycheck entries. I hate to say it, but it might be needed to recreate them too once you have the paycheck reminder doing the right thing.

But come to think of it before doing any of this try Validate and Repair and see if that fixes the problem.

As for the HSA that is the same problem as your catch-up one. Quicken knows (or should know) that when using these selections:

For the entry it has to do that special tax entry. Unfortunately, you can only use that selection once. And as such you need to make that kind of entry yourself like I did for my example 401K catch-up.

And now that I think of it, I'm going to revise my suggestion on #2. If Validate and Repair doesn't work, you can just use the same kind of workaround to fix a given paycheck.

That is put in a pre-tax entry with the category of _401Contrib this will be the amount that your wages should be reduced for tax purposes.

Note that this workaround assumes that the problem is that for some reason the tax account entry isn't being made. In the case of the 401K catch-up and the HSA it is obvious why they don't have this entry, Quicken doesn't know to treat them special like this, but the main one should have been doing this and is somehow not working properly.

If the problem turns out to be that the tax reporting is ignoring the _401Contrib category for some reason, that would be a completely different problem, but I doubt that is the case.

mikek753b · January 15

I'm going crazy with this 😖

I just can't make it to work.

I run the Validate, no issues.

I recreated new Paycheck reminder and enter the 1st pay for this year from that reminder.

The Tax Planner, nether YTD doesn't see this new —Paycheck— transaction _401Contrib , no any existing deductions for the 401k pre tax item.

But, the Tax Planner shows future 401k pre tax items correctly.

No, this 401k pre tax item isn't in the "Tax Impact of 401(k) Accounts", but I see there _401ContribSpouse from my spouse Paycheck transactions.

Somehow Bills Enter for the Paycheck doesn't create expected transaction in the "Tax Impact of 401(k) Accounts".

I also can't create 401k Catch-up item, due to 401k is grey out, allows just 1 401k item in the pre tax, so I sum-up 401k and catch-up to single 401k.

this is the split for paycheck transaction

Chris_QPW · January 15

I created a reminder from one of my wife's paycheck transactions and to my surprise when entered into the register it worked just fine, affecting the tax impact account and all. So, I have to surmise that the "magic" isn't in the reminder like I thought, but instead something about the transfer into the 401K account.

That makes me believe that there is something wrong with the 401K account.

In my test if I changed the 401K transfer to a regular brokerage account the tax impact account wasn't affected.

But if I changed it to a transfer to one of my old 401K accounts, it did, but with _401Contrib instead of _401ContribSpouse.

So, go to the Account details and make sure that it is in fact setup as a 401K account.

As a test you can also try changing one of your older paychecks to transfer to a different 401K account (you can create a new one or just use an existing one you know works).

If that test works, and the old first 401K account is setup properly then what might be needed is for you do create a new 401K account and then move all the transactions from the old one to the new one.

Note in all of this, this is just to get the main 401K transfer to affect the tax impact account and show up in the tax information. It won't affect the catch-up or the HSA entries. For those you would have either combine them with the main one or use the offset kind of entry I showed like this:

Chris_QPW · January 15

Oops on that last part I realized I didn't tell you how to get the extra income so that the net pay stayed the same and doesn't affect other things. Here is the entry as "Other earnings" (Add Earning).

Where this paycheck is entered into the checking account above. This is the syntax for saying that the $10 is a "balance adjustment" that doesn't affect any other account/category (comes from outside of Quicken).

Q97 · January 15

I have this same issue of 401(k) catch up contributions not being reflected correctly in the tax planner. If I look under Tax Planner > Wages > Wages and Salaries - Self, I see future scheduled catch up contributions in the table at the bottom, which is correct, but not ones corresponding to paychecks already entered. I work around this by entering an (negative) Adjustment for the "missing" contributions, whose value I update after entering each new paycheck. It's a bit of a hassle, but a simple straightforward workaround for the bug.

mikek753b · January 15

thank you all for the replies

The 401k account looks Ok, it even show expected Contribution correct value

However, I don't see any for the Tax Schedule, is it expected?

mikek753b · January 15

Yes, I tried to change 401k account to my wife and I got this record in the "Tax Impact of 401(k) Accounts" and in the YTD correctly.

When I switch back to my 401k account that transaction was just removed from the "Tax Impact of 401(k) Accounts" and the YTD.

My Quicken just doesn't create expected _401Contrib transaction

Category List shows _401Contrib Ok

I checked my wife 401k Tax Schedule, it's empty as well.

I'll try to create my new 401k account to test if _401Contrib will be created

mikek753b · January 15

I created new off-line my 401k and changed existing paycheck to use that account and I got _401Contrib in YTD and transaction in the "Tax Impact of 401(k) Accounts"

@Chris_QPW you are right about something with my existing 401k config, as new 401k account works as expected

How I can fix my real existing 401k account?

moving back the paycheck to use real existing 401k account was removed expected transaction from YTD and transaction in the "Tax Impact of 401(k) Accounts"

yes, I created backup and started this experiment in copied new data file, just in case

Chris_QPW · January 15

Lucky enough about a year ago they put in a feature that makes moving transaction in an investment account to another quite easy. Go into the old 401K account, select the gear icon and then Move Transactions. Then Select All and select the new 401k account from the pulldown menu, and then select Move. And last Done.

You will have to delete the old 401K account and setup the new one for downloading.

One thing will be interesting to see if this actually fixes the older transactions in the tax impact account.

mikek753b · January 15

@Chris_QPW yes, this did the trick

However, select all transactions and move didn't work. Transactions just disappeared, moved out from the original 401k, but nothings except 4 got into new 401k.

I restarted from the backup and went with batches at around 100 till all were moved from the original 401k, but I can't say if all were moved to new 401k yet.

yes, some old paycheck transfers appeared in the "Tax Impact of 401(k) Accounts", but only some.

Some of those are from old paycheck that has both 401k and catch-up 2 transactions.

For 1 paycheck that didn't get to "Tax Impact of 401(k) Accounts" I increased 401k by the catch-up value and deleted the catch-up item then it appeared in the "Tax Impact of 401(k) Accounts"

The Tax Planner looks better, but there is old strange issue that it doesn't calculate scheduled correctly, so I have to re select the Scheduled to get correct value.

This issue I see for my Wages and Withholdings, any corrections to use proper Scheduled resets correct value in Wages and Withholdings, as result I can't get correct Tax Due

Chris_QPW · January 15

I don't think I can offer any more help. Something is really wrong with the data it seems.

mikek753b · January 16

Hello @Chris_QPW ,

I appreciate all your help you provided, I'll contact Quicken support to address my Tax Planner related issues

Maybe extra validation for my data file will be needed.

Thank you

markus1957 · January 16

Correcting a corrupted 401k account link to the Tax Impact account can be frustrating. See the attached 2 threads for suggestions and background. As I recall after setting up the new 401k and getting the Tax Impact account to function properly, it required going back to each paycheck entry, clicking edit and then saving it; that spawns an entry to the Tax Impact account. Simply moving transactions does not create the Tax Impact register transaction; that happens only when the Paycheck is "entered".

Adding- regarding Tax Planner not sticking to Scheduled for projections, try using Reset Tax Planner to Defaults. Also, it is sometimes better to close Quicken and reopen when Tax Planner gets wonky. But Scheduled should stick unless the Reminder at issue is corrupted in which case it should be deleted and recreated.

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7605716/qwin-2017-misssing-401contrib-category

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7721701/tax-impact-categories-in-quicken