Edit Tax Line Item List
Would it be possible to allow users to edit a Tax Line Item Category, for example, "1040 Adjustments to income from Schedule 1, line 26" or "Form 8889" ? Quicken seems to only list the most commonly used tax line items, and many of us can not fully use this feature. This would take care of categorizing the income adjustment for tax reporting for HSAs. This would give the user the ability to customize the drop-down items under "Tax Line Items Category". Rather than requiring Quicken to make a change in the Tax Line Items whenever the IRS decides to update things, the user can customize based on their individual needs. 🙏
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I am in favor of this Idea, but as I see it, there are several places in Quicken where the Tax line items are used:
- Tax reports
- Business reports
- Tax Planner
- Export to TurboTax
and perhaps other places as well. Adding line items is a good start, but for them to be useful, they would have to flow to the other places as well.
For me the Tax reports and Tax Planner are most important, but others may have different priorities. I don't use the TurboTax export.
What do others think?
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There are several scheduled forms and tax docs (ex 1098-T) that could be added to make it a lot easier to categorize for tax time. I would be in favor of editing myself or having Quicken add these schedule forms or docs. The forms change but the items that the forms reflect do not. For example: A 1098-T has been for educational expenses for as long as I remember and has not changed. I am not saying add the box numbers or the form calcs but just the forms associated with those expenses.
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TurboTax export is key. Without that, Quicken becomes useless.
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And there is the problem, when people state that the problem becomes almost impossible.
Intuit almost never updated the tax lines when they owned Quicken. And you can guarantee there isn't any "generic interface" for this between Quicken and TurboTax. So, how does Quicken Inc even convince Intuit to update this interface, let it alone somehow work with the user being able to put in whatever tax line they want?
As long as it was restricted to Quicken itself, there is a chance, but in my opinion if the requirement is that it works with TurboTax that is never going to happen.
BTW Just so people know how it use to work (internal to Quicken not exported to TurboTax) These three files were used (they are in program files\Quicken).
They are text files you can edit them and see what is inside of them.
TAX.PRI
TAX.SCD
TAX.THP
I'm not going try to explain exactly how these were used for the simple reason that I might wrong, but needless to say some people were editing them and using the result (in Quicken), how successful that was I don't know. Did it work for all the tax reports, for the tax planner, for exporting to TXF files???
But what I do know is that even though these files are still there, they aren't being used. You can no longer edit them and have any effect on Quicken. This was in fact one of the first signs to me that Quicken Inc had merged the Canadian branch back into the US branch. See, if you have both of them in the same branch, and you mostly just switch the behavior based on some runtime information, then you can't share the same files that have different tax information in them. So, they put these either in other files that I haven't found or some other "internal" place, maybe even in the data file. Using the "lazy programmer" approach I suspect that they really didn't change the code much just where to get this information.
But here is the result, if I'm in a Quicken Windows US data file I get the US tax lines. If I'm in a Quicken Widows Canadian data file I get the Canadian tax lines.
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But what I do know is that even though these files are still there, they aren't being used. You can no longer edit them and have any effect on Quicken.
They're still in use and you can edit them with results. The problem is they'll get clobbered by the next program update so you'd need to store your edits somewhere.
Quicken user since version 2 for DOS, now using QWin Biz & Personal Subscription (US) on Win10 Pro.
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After seeing some of your posts I should have come back and updated my comments. I see where I went wrong.
I was looking at the files in C:\Program Files… They have the files there, but those aren't the ones they are using.
What I still haven't figured out is where the Canadian ones are. I can switch to a Canadian data file and get their tax lines.
So, clearly this has been changed to a "runtime" not "compile time" switch, but unlike some other parts that are Canadian only and I can find a separation, I can't find it for the tax lines… I just found it!
"C:\ProgramData\Quicken\Can\Inet\Common\Localweb\Tax"
I wish I had known this sooner because there were some Canadian users that were editing the original tax files and when they switched to these awhile back it stopped working for them of course.
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Sounds like we cannot edit or add TLI's if we want it to work with Turbo Tax. (Unless TurboTax makes an adjustment on their end). TLI's for me, are only used for exporting to TurboTax. So, a feature to allow the edit of TLI's, would be useless to me, without the corresponding feature added to TT.
I suppose I could do it the manual way, and generate a report from Quicken, and enter the numbers by hand, into TT. In that sense, some control over TLI's would have a partial benefit.
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I was curious to see how all of this ties together, so I started looking into the .TXF format. We can't look at exactly what the export from Quicken to TurboTax is doing, so this is as close as I can come. I wouldn't be surprised at all if all they are doing it an export of the .TXF file and importing that into TurboTax.
Looking at the three files that Quicken uses, I quickly notice that something is missing. You have all these "reference numbers", but no table reference them into the actual tax lines on the tax forms.
I found this very useful site:
And immediately found what I suspected. Intuit was the that created it, and they were the ones maintaining it. "Were" being the keyword.
Looking at the remarks in the TAX.SCD file the last changed was put in, in 2007.
The above website on the "By …" pages fills in that missing table, as in the cross reference between the reference number in the files above used in Quicken and the actual tax lines.
The website mentions that not only is Intuit not maintaining this no online tax programs use it. There is a reference to using OFX, and that it has shortcomings. I believe this is like where TurboTax goes directly to the financial institution to down the information directly into TurboTax.
Given the above, I think all of this is a dead end path.
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Good find, @Chris_QPW.
I think the file https://www.taxdataexchange.org/docs/txf/v042/reference-numbers-by-number.html might have a marginal use for someone who wants to add new line items enough to put in the work.
It shows the 3-digit codes used in Quicken's TAX.* files in numerical order. In particular, the largest number shown is 718. So If a Quicken
userhacker wants to add more TLIs, that file shows numbers that shouldn't be reused. It should be safe to use 900-999 for personal purposes.Obviously no tax software will use user-created TLIs, but if someone wanted them bad enough to show in Quicken reports as TLIs, they could do it. There's a lot missing since the tables were last updated. For example, I've always wished for a "Schedule A:Health Insurance Premiums" TLI and "Schedule A:Long Term Care Insurance Premiums". Currently, it's a pain to separate those from other medical expense TLIs.
Quicken user since version 2 for DOS, now using QWin Biz & Personal Subscription (US) on Win10 Pro.
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I do not use TurboTax, but would really like to mark that account to be included on the Tax Schedule. Is there a work around for this?
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