Best way to exclude previous tax year payments from current year report?
I'm using Quicken Classic Premier Mac, Version 7.4.2. I just started using it a few weeks ago, and imported all my transactions/accounts from my banks.
I am trying to use the EasyAnswer report "What taxable events occurred this year?". And it mostly looks good except all my tax payments for 2022 that were paid in January 2023 and April 2023 show up. And this greatly throws off the W-2 section for taxes withheld this year.
This seems like a common occurrence since you always pay for the previous year's taxes in the following year. I have not found a way to designate a "tax year" to a specific transaction.
How do you designate federal or state tax payments to a specific year, that is different from the transaction date, so that they will not show up in reports like this? Or Is there a better report to use that can figure this out automatically?
Quicken support told me to temporarily recategorize the tax transactions so they won't show in the report, run the report, and then categorize them back to normal. Is this hack really they only way to work?
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Create a tag for each tax year - TY2022, TY2023, etc - and add the appropriate tag to each tax payment. Then edit the report to only include the tag for the desired tax year.
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The report analyzes transactions across all my credit cards, investments, and bank accounts. Are you actually suggesting I tag thousands of transactions 2023 with "TY2023" just to exclude the 2022 federal and state tax payments from Jan & April?
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Are you really making thousands of tax payments? I doubt it. Just tag the transactions in the tax-related categories that show up on the report.
No matter what method you used to indicate the tax year for a given transaction you'd facing the same problem of having to apply it to each relevant transaction, it's not like Quicken is going to magically figure it out on its own. And with tags, you can apply them to groups of transactions all at once so you don't have to go through and do it one transaction at a time (except with splits, but I think it's unlikely you'd have a split transaction with splits going to two different tax years so that shouldn't be an issue either). That might be the easiest thing to do - tag all 2023 transactions as TY2023 then go through and re-tag the 2023 transactions that were really payments for TY2022, there can't be very many of those.
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Doesn't Q Mac ask about which tax year should be applied to tax payments made in certain tax categories?
I'm not sure if this would apply to imported transactions, however.
As a workaround for past transactions I'd change the transaction date to 12/31/xx of the tax year and add a Memo text "actually paid on 1/xx/xx" (or 4/xx/xx)
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You are correct I don't have thousands of tax payments. But all my interest payments, dividends, doctor bills, stock sales, etc. make the transaction count very high for all tax-related categories that the report analyzes. Thats why I don't see your tag approach as something workable long term. I would need to remember to do it correctly after every time I import new transactions.
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@UKR, no there were no questions asked when quicken did the initial imports from my banks. Thanks for the workaround suggestion.
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I would need to remember to do it correctly after every time I import new transactions.
Or just do it once at the end of the year.
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Some of us have to pay taxes quarterly :)
Sorry Jon but that seems like a lot of extra work to continue to remember to do correctly, really thought an advanced & old app like Quicken would have a better solution.
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I don't know what you expect, but there's no way Quicken is going to figure out on its own which tax year a transaction is for, you're going to have to tell it somehow.
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BTW, if you have QuickFill rules that automatically categorize transactions they can apply tags at the same time. You'd have to update the rules each year, and you'd still have to manually change the tag for transactions that applied to the previous TY, but that could automate a lot of it.
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The only other thing I can think of is the original suggestion - have separate categories for tax payments that are not for the current calendar year and exclude those categories from the report. That way you'd only have to do something special for those few transactions.
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IMHO, never mind the Tag = TY20xx suggestion.
My workaround (change transaction date to 12/31/xx) only needs to be applied to the 1 or 2 quarterly tax payment transactions made in January and April for the prior year's taxes.And next year please keep an eye out for these two transactions, as you record them, and see if Quicken asks about the tax year to apply.
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I would think you only need to tag the estimates and tax due payments, not all the transactions done during the year for the year. Just the ones that were done for a different year.
I'm staying on Quicken 2013 Premier for Windows.
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@volvogirl 's suggestion could work - you could edit the report and select all the tags except that one.
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I tagged the transactions as "TaxYear2022", and edited the reports I need to only include non-tagged transactions. Since I have not used any tags I think this solution could work.
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