What's the best way to enter credit card transactions that allows me to find a tax deductible entry?

Question

Quicken Mac. I use the split transaction feature using my credit card and now at the end of the year and working on taxes, I cannot find a way to get my tax deductible items on my report, such as charitable contributions and taxes paid. What am I doing wrong? How should I be putting these into Quicken when paying numerous items with credit card?

Jon · Accepted Answer

You should be assigning a tax-related category to tax-related expenses. You should be able to do that even if you're just creating one split transaction each month with all your credit card purchases. For example, there's a Gifts & Donations category with a Charity subcategory that you can use for charitable contributions, and there's a Taxes category with subcategories for Federal, State, and other taxes that are all assigned as being tax-related. If you open the Categories window and look at the Tax Form and Tax Line columns you can see which categories Quicken considers relevant to your taxes; you can modify many of those to customize them to your liking.

If you have a receipt with multiple items and only some of them are tax-deductible then you'll have to split that transaction up into multiple entries; the splits won't exactly match the transactions on your credit card statement anymore but your tax report will be correct.

At tax time you can run Tax reports that will show tax related income & expense transactions.

For example, here's a split transaction with a few tax-related entries:

Then when I create a Tax Schedule report, those are all included:

Jon · Accepted Answer

I don't know. The default Gifts & Donations:Gift category is not a tax-related one. If you don't want transactions categorized as Gift to show up on your tax report you can edit the Category & make it not tax related. Open the Categories window, scroll down to the Gift category & double click on it, then click on the "Tax-Related" slider to turn it off.

Pleasehelp · Accepted Answer

Yep. Very helpful. Thank you. And thanks for the use of screen shots. It really helps clarify. I'm beginning to see how to tweak this thing to make it work for us.