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Paycheck splits have gone missing QMac

Susie

In preparing a tax report I discovered that all the deductions from paychecks I entered for 2023 are missing. This information is necessary for tax preparation and I am beyond frustrated. Any advice, help? Is it worth re-entering the entire year's information? Will it disappear again?

Thank you.

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Comments

UKR

For recurring transactions with required category splits, I recommend that you set up and use a Scheduled Transaction Reminder.
Record this reminder every month BEFORE Due Date and BEFORE you download transactions from the bank. This way, a valid transaction with category splits already exists in the register and any downloaded transaction will be matched to it, without messing up the splits.
If Q Mac cannot automatically match the downloaded transaction and creates a duplicate new one instead (without any Splits), you need to drag the downloaded transaction over the one you created from the Reminder. This will eliminate any duplicates and retain your splits.

jacobs

@UKR Your advice is sound for the future, but it doesn't address @Susie's question about the existing transactions.

@Susie It's a little hard to understand how a bunch of transactions all lost all their splits at once, but I'm not sure knowing what happened will help. Do you have any idea how long ago these transactions were edited? For instance, if you were to open a backup file from early January which would have all your 2023 paychecks, does it have the splits? Or were they already missing at that time?

The next question I'd raise is: do you actually need this information? We all record paychecks and dutifully break them down to record deductions, but in the end, all you should need for your taxes is your W-2 (or if you had more than one job, your W-2s from each employer). I don't know if you prepare your own taxes using software like TurboTax or if you give your information to an accountant, but either way, the W-2(s) have all the information that's needed for your taxes. I n my case, although I have all the paychecks recorded perfectly, I don't even look at that when entering our data into TurboTax; the W-2s are the definitive source of data.

Once you get past the immediate 2023 tax return issue, then it's time to turn attention back to what's going on in Quicken Mac.

First, I'd suggest fixing the transactions for the paychecks you have received so far in 2024, so you'll be set up to have everything right for this year. (I'm not sure you'll get much benefit from going back to fix all the 2023 transactions… unless you have money from your paychecks going into a retirement account, and the retirement account now has and incorrect balance because the transfers from the paychecks in 2023 disappeared. If that's the case, post back about it and we can discuss a few ways to address that.)
Last year, did you do what @UKR described: have a recurring scheduled transaction for your paycheck deposit, with all the splits?
Do you download transactions from your bank?
When a paycheck deposit download from your bank, does it automatically match with your next scheduled transaction? If not, do you drag one over the other to match them?
If you were doing something different last year, I'd suggest setting up such a scheduled transaction now, and seeing how it works for your next paycheck.

You ask: "Will it disappear again?" Well, it shouldn't. 😉 But then again, nothing should have changed your transactions from last year, either. When I hear something like this, my suspicion first turns to syncing with Quicken Cloud as a possible culprit. Your Quicken desktop file and Quicken Cloud dataset are supposed to remain in sync, and they should both update each other, but any time someone reports data they edited in their desktop file has been altered, my prime suspect is that Quicken Cloud has synced to with your desktop and wiped out the edits you made locally. Do you use the companion mobile app or the web interface to Quicken? If not, I'd definitely go to Settings > Mobile Web & Alerts and turn the big Sync button to Off; then go to Settings > Connected Services and click the Reset button to wipe out any of your transaction data stored on Quicken's cloud servers. Going forward, this assures your transactions will only be in your desktop file. If you do use the mobile app and need to continue using it, post back and we can talk about a few things to do to try to prevent syncing from wiping out edited data.

Susie

Thank you so much! I understand that I can just use the W-2, but after I painstakingly input all the entries for each paycheck, I really like to have an accurate tax report for the year. The split information is still there for April and May 2023, not before or after, until 2024 where the information was not deleted. I cannot figure out which backup to use and do not really want to re-enter a years worth of data. But I would like to correct the 2023 missing information which includes payments to 403(b) and 457 accounts.

I did have "recurring transactions" for the paycheck, but before the downloading the transaction from the bank, I always entered the correct split information which always changes (taxes withheld, Medicare and SSA payments, insurance payments, retirement deposits, etc.). I don't know what you mean by "dragging the transaction to match ".

I just turned off the mobile sync in case that caused the problem.

I so appreciate your help!

jacobs

After turning off the mobile sync, it's important to also do the Reset in Settings > Connected Services. Otherwise, any accounts you had set up for downloading may still be downloading in the cloud server.

What I mean about dragging a transaction is that you can pre-enter a transaction, then have it download from your bank, and if Quicken doesn't recognize they should be merged together, you can drag one on top of the other to tell Quicken to merge them. In the case of a paycheck, your manually-entered schedule transaction has splits for your gross pay and for each of your deductions, while the downloaded transaction from the bank will just be a simple transaction for the net pay amount. If Quicken doesn't automatically match and merge those, dragging one on the other will cause them to merge. (And if it's a scheduled transaction, it will change it from a scheduled transaction to a real/posted transaction at the same time).

In terms of last year, there are a couple things you could do. How are the existing transactions, without the splits, categorized? Are they using a category to your personal income? Then what you could do is create a second transaction just to create the deductions. To do this, you'd create a new scheduled transaction of Type=Income with the Amount=$0.00. The first split line would be the difference between your net pay (which is already recorded) and gross pay, with the category set to the same personal income category; this will make your pay for the year in Quicken correct, because the net pay amount plus this amount will equal your actual gross pay. Then you'd enter all the splits for deductions and transfers to the 403(b) and 457 accounts, so that the total of all the splits adds up to zero. Set this recurring transaction to begin on your first pay date in January 2023, at the same interval as your paycheck (biweekly, monthly or whatever it was). Then go through and click "Deposited" 26 times (or however many paychecks you had last year) to get you through December 2023; then go back and delete the ones in the weeks where your existing paycheck deposit had the correct splits. And double-click this scheduled transaction on its next instance (in January 2024), and select Delete All Instances now that you're done with this corrective transaction. In this way, in about 5 minutes, you can get your gross pay and all your deductions correct for each month and the year, without having to edit all your paycheck transactions individually.

You need to look at the 403(b) and 457 accounts to see if doing this has duplicated your deposits into those accounts. I'm not sure what happened when your original paychecks got changed to lose their splits; is there a generic transfer transaction depositing money into these accounts each pay period, or did the transfers disappear when your paychecks were somehow modified? If the original deposits not the accounts were gone, then the fixer transactions described above should get your balances up to where they should be; if the original deposits were there, you'll have to go through to select and delete all the ones with the generic Category="Transfer" and leave the new ones with Category="Transfer:[checking account]".

Before you start, (a) make a manual backup (just in case something goes south!), and (b) note the balance of all the involved accounts currently, if they are correct, so you can make sure you get back to the correct values after these corrective actions.

There are other approaches you could use. For instance, you could choose to calculate the values for all the missing paycheck splits and create one year-end entry to fix it, rather than creating the recurring entry I described above.

allyw

This also happened to me! Every single paycheck that I logged tax deductions for in 2023 had all of the split categories changed to “Uncategorized.” It’s especially infuriating because my paychecks are always for different amounts - I can’t just have a memorized split, I have to go in and do it manually each time. So all that tedious work is out the window, and I have to pull up my paystubs and do it a second time! This is one of several huge glitches that Quicken has had for me in the past few weeks.

Susie

I feel your pain. I have started the laborious process of re-entering the split information. The paychecks I entered for 2024 were not deleted, only the ones in 2023.

jacobs

@allyw You may already do this, but you should still have a scheduled transaction for your paychecks, even though your pay amount and deductions are different every time. You can make all the amounts zero, but this gives you a template each time you're paid so you don't have to recreate the splits — you only have to tab through and update the amounts.

Susie

good idea!

A. Blackwood

I just noticed the same problem here. I have not edited any settings whatsoever. Looks like the splits for about two years of paycheck entries have disappeared. I'm not happy.

A. Blackwood

Looking a bit closer, there are 52 (exactly two years of paycheck entries) transactions that are missing splits. Coincidence? Still not happy.

dan.greenberg.ct

Is it possible that you have two or more saved entries for paychecks and that you may have been entering one that doesn't have the splits? Check your QuickFill rules and see if you have more than one rule for your paycheck.

allyw

@jacobs I'm not sure this would work for me - because of my field of work, I do not receive checks at regular intervals. There is basically no way to anticipate when a check will come in, so I can’t really “schedule” the transactions (unless I’m misunderstanding what that feature is). At one point I did have a Quickfill rule saved to try and accomplish what I think you’re describing, but it did not work very well, so I abandoned it.

In any case, that’s not the problem. I don’t mind doing the splits manually - I just expect that the software I’m paying for to track my finances is not going to randomly delete a whole year’s worth of data for no apparent reason!

@dan.greenberg.ct, for me at least, I do not have any Quickfill rules saved for these transactions. Even if I did, I don’t see why a Quickfill rule would be retroactively affecting transactions that I had already split and categorized manually. And the problem I’m having is not that the splits themselves have disappeared. The amounts of the different split are still there, but all of the categories I had assigned them (Federal Tax, State Tax, Medicare, etc.) have been changed to “Uncategorized.” I’m attaching a screenshot for reference.

Quicken also has recently started repeatedly deleting my custom tax categories, something that the technical support rep I spoke to for 2+ hours was not able to make heads or tails of. However, the tax categories that were deleted were not the same categories that I had applied to these splits. So it couldn’t have been that the categories disappeared just because they were deleted. Although maybe this points to a broader problems with tax categories generally.

jacobs

@allyw Thanks for the screenshot and explanation. I was thinking that your splits just disappeared, but now I understand it's that the categories have been lost. @Susie is this the same for you, or did your 2023 paycheck transactions lose the splits entirely?

@allyw I'm thinking I've read of some other users who have reported this problem. It's not frequent, but I don't think you're alone. I'm just not sure what's at play. But I don't recall any reports from users of categories just disappearing, as you've reported here.

In terms of recording your paychecks, I understand why a scheduled transaction doesn't work for you. I'm not sure why creating a QuickFill rules wouldn't work, though. If you create a unique Payee for your paychecks (e.g. "Ally Paycheck Deposit", with the transaction amount and all the splits set to $0.00, then when you get paid, you should be able to create a new transaction for Ally Paycheck Deposit, select the QuickFill entry, enter your net pay as the amount, and open the splits screen to tab through and enter the split amounts.

Alternatively, you can just locate a past paycheck and select it, click Transactions > Duplicate Transaction (or simply press Command-D), change the date to the current date, and tab through to change the amounts to match your new paycheck. Either way, you at least don't have to create all the split lines with each paycheck.

Susie

no, this is not the same for me. The split information is completely gone. I’ve just gone through the exercise of re-entering the information and hope that it sticks

A. Blackwood

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20420754#Comment_20420754

No, I don't.