Tracking Personal Sales Tax Payments in Quicken Classic

BenT

With the new income tax law changes and due to buying a new family vehicle this year I am interested in tracking all my family general sales tax purchases using Quicken Classic. But it is a bit awkward. Any tools to help streamline this process would be great.

A couple issues I have: If you search for a particular transaction by amount using Quicken Classic for Windows and only that one transaction shows up, then you naturally want to split it and enter the sales tax using a "Sales Tax Paid" income tax category. Often when I do this and select OK/Done on the Split transaction window, Quicken forgets the whole thing. I have not nailed down the sequence but maybe a transaction search leading to a single result, then editing that result, then canceling the search filter—cancelling a search filter should not lead to cancelling the work you did on a transaction that was found in the search.

Second thing is streamlining the split transaction window in the Windows product. The Quicken Classic on iPhone is nice that you don't need to enter the original total by hand and then press "minus/subtract" just to create one split. But in Windows that is what you have to do every time, select split, wait for the split window to pop up, then select the total, then re-enter the total amount and use the "calculator" to subtract the sales tax, then a remainder shows up on the second line in the split transaction window.

The Holy Grail in this? I am glad Quicken takes receipt photos for storage but this is only helpful for so many transactions with small amounts if Quicken can scan receipts for content, identify the vendor, amount, and the portion that is sales tax and automatically associate a new receipt photo with a cleared transaction and automatically set up the split for total and sales tax. Further splitting out tip amount or gift card purchases would be great as well.

Gift card tracking? For sales tax associated with purchases made from gift cards or loyalty programs like my Starbucks app, is the only good way to create a separate account for it? Then do you split a purchase from Costco or Walmart for the gift card and somehow transfer that as a balance transfer to the particular gift card account?

NotACPA

In my state, there a multiple sales tax rates which depend upon what's being bought.

SO, I split most transactions and use a TAXES:Sales Tax category, which I created to record that portion.

Also, since my state doesn't tax salaries, that Sales Tax category is assigned the Tax Line of "Schedule A: State Income Taxes" which is where it's reported on my IRS 1040.

Other sub-cats under TAXES are for Federal income tax withheld, Real Estate taxes paid, Medicare & SocSec taxes withheld, etc. Any federal taxes paid with my return go to a "Prior Year Tax" category with no tax line assigned.

My experience, over the 30+ years that I've lived in this state, is that my actual Sales tax is MUCH more (sometimes 2x - 3x) what the IRS tables show. As long as I can document my actual payments, I'm completely within the law.