"scott s." wrote
I am helping my Dad with his finances, so I created a Q2017 file for him and entered 6 months of data as a basis for determining a budget.
The problem is, I can't get a budget or check his monthly cash flow because I can't get his IRA distributions to show as "income". After playing around some I was able to get Q to show the distribution in the tax schedule report and the amounts witheld for fed/state income tax show as expenses, but the gross distribution I can't show anywhere, except as part of transfers which I can't isolate the distributions from other transfers
The IRA account is a brokerage investment account and there is no linked bank account. Generally what happens is shares of funds are sold and sweeped into a MM fund. The distribution data is d/led via direct connect as a "sell" action to account's cash balance from the MM and matching "withdraw" action that is a transfer into either a different investment account or a bank checking account, except for direct payments which are expensed. To get the tax sched report to work, I created a dummy cash account to transfer the amounts for witholding into, then did a second transaction from this cash account to record the actual tax payment.
Typically in a month there is a single distribution that gets split 3 ways in expenses -- mortgage payment, fed, and state witholding but irregularly there will be additional distribution to meet RMD.
An additional question that came up as I was playing around with the investment transactions is "what is the difference between a "withdraw" action and a "cash transfered out of account" action?"
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Quicken addresses the taxable impact of gross IRA distributions by assigning the appropriate Tax Line Item to "Transfers out" of the IRA account. [See the Tax Schedule button in the Edit Account Details button in the IRA account.] Those distributions should already appear in your Tax reports.
When you want to have withholding taken from the distribution income, you run into the problem that the tax reports exclude "tax deferred" accounts by default.
While you could customize the Tax reports to show one or more tax deferred accounts, that would likely just make the problem different, but worse.
So, as you appear to have already discovered, you need to take the withholding expenses in a non-tax-deferred account.
But I don't think you need a special account for that. I think you can just modify the distribution transfer in the account where the distribution will be deposited. Modify that transaction to be a split transaction, with the withholding accounted for in separate split lines.
Once the net distribution amount has been deposited in the appropriate Quicken account with the withholding accounted for in a split transaction, you can create whatever other transactions you need (such as a mortgage payment) as a totally separate transaction ... no differently than you would treat a paycheck transaction with multiple deductions whose net amount increased the account balance enough to allow you to make a mortgage payment.
" ... what is the difference between a 'withdraw' action and a 'cash transfered out of account' action?"
For the purposes of this discussion, the only difference is that Quicken only recognizes the "Cash transferred out of account" transaction in an IRA account as a taxable transaction ... only the Cash transferred out of account transaction uses the "Tax Schedule" tax line item (see above).