Quicken - Interest & Schedule B

To benefit from Quicken, the most important and useful thing is to categorize transactions properly and in a meaningful matter. The burden of doing it is completely on the user.

let's see - downloaded transactions from a bank that were described as "Interest", and yet when they are used between Quicken & TurboTax, they no longer are "Interest" without my manually categorizing them ???

let me just cut/paste my other reply -

-- you're kidding right ? I don't even know where to begin to reply to this line of thinking... A financial program that defines the transaction types, and downloads them from participating institutions and then on the back end can't bring the basic information together in a meaningful manner without my manipulating the already tagged data into manual categories ???

That's just nuts -

"P.Schuman" wrote in news:0Twqj.4033$ snipped-for-privacy@newssvr22.news.prodigy.net:

Well, let's see: when it's "interest" on my personal acct, it goes to sked B. When it's interest on a business acct, it goes to Sked C,E, or F depending on the business, assuming I'm not a c corp or a partnership. Or, it could be tax emempt, at the state or federal level. Other than that, I guess it's just nuts.

scott s. .

They are described as "interest" only because of the text that the bank passes to the program. That populates the Payee field but not the category field. The user has to define what category ALL transactions are to be mapped to. Your transactions in the "blank" category mean nothing to Q or TT.

Additionally, the user must also specify what tax line, if any, a category falls into or your tax summary reports will be meaningless.

No. that is how the program works. It appears that you feel that the financial institution should be the one to define the category your expenses fall into. What is a personal expense for you might be a business expense to me. It is up to the user to define and map the categories the transactions fall into. This must be done on a transaction by transaction basis.

It sounds like it is time for you to go back through that "blank" category and figure out which category they belong to.

Are your transactions getting a Category from your financial institution ?

My downloads from Chase only have the "Interest Payment" text, with no Category..... which appears to be the trigger/used field for the totaling vs the other way around.

Not always. It all depends on how you set up your preferences and Memorized Payee list. For example I have all checks automatically mapped into "Misc expense" instead of leaving the category blank. I have a report saved to report Uncategorized and Misc Expense categories so that I can go online and view the checks to see what they are for. The banks don't scan the checks so the Payee comes through as Check ####.

Most of my transactions are repeats and Q relies on the "memorized payee" information to populate the category. I still have to confirm that the category assigned is appropriate for that particular transaction or manually change it to an appropriate category based on that particular transaction. As I posted earlier, the program nor my bank can detect which Staples purchases are for personal vs business use. Why would you expect the bank to know that info???

Chase passes the text to Q that you will see on the paper statement. That will go into the Payee field. It is up to the user to populate the Category field. Once you have mapped "interest payment" as a payee to "Interest Expense" as a category it will remember it the next time it is passed by Chase to your program.

If your transactions are always coming through as uncategorized, check your preferences. In particular check the QuickFill settings.

Unless I have a memorized transaction, I have to enter categories. In some versions of Quicken it has a feature to suggests categories for certain charges - but I have disabled that.

I would run a report >> To benefit from Quicken, the most important and useful thing is to

I would also review the tax lines assigned to each category. I found several of mine that were missing because I forgot to specify it when I set up the category.

This is incorrect. Interest income for an individual taxpayer always goes on Schedule B, never on C, E or F.

just a note - I saw your comment about Quicken being a giant checkbook... but - for ME - I only use it for the other side of the coin - Investments -

Therefore, I only see incoming data, from banks, brokerages, quotes, alerts, news, etc... Sure, there are outgoing checks... but we don't actually care about those, we just use it as a financial stock, mutual fund, interest, and general portfolio manager. I thought that this incoming financial data would then properly flow into the TurboTax buckets.

I use it for bank accounts, credit cards, investment accounts and accounts receivables.

I think most people here don't use Q for only investment accounts based on the nature of the questions asked. You may be the exception to the rule. It probably would have been helpful if you had shared that piece of information when you first posed your question.

For investment accounts, the categories are pretty standard ones and should get automatically populated. I have never had to adjust the categories assigned to dividends or interest. I did notice that the tax lines were not all populated so I had to update them.

If you are more concerned about the Investments, I would look at software designed for that specific purpose.

Brian wrote in news:1uHqj.7490$ snipped-for-privacy@newssvr13.news.prodigy.net:

Not trying to be argumentative, but I am curious if you have a cite for that? Reason I'm asking is that in my state there is a tax ruling that interest on a business bank account is subject to the gross receipts tax. It could be that state and federal treatment is different, but I would be interested in knowing for sure. I took a look in IRS Pub 334 and it seemed kind of vague on the subject.

scott s. .

Hi, Scott.

Brian is right. A sole proprietorship business is simply the alter ego of the individual who owns it. The business does not get a separate TIN (Taxpayer Identification Number). Even W-2s issued to the employees use the TIN of the individual employer. If one individual owns two or a dozen separate businesses, they all use the same TIN on their several Schedule Cs. And any bank accounts or investment accounts use that individual TIN, too.

A partnership is a separate tax entity and gets its own TIN. A corporation is a legal "person" and gets its own TIN, even if it is 100% owned by one individual.

State laws vary because state legislators jealously guard the right of each state to make its own laws, as guaranteed by the Constitution. (Although states have given up much of that right in return for more money or other benefits from the federal government. But let's not get into a political debate here.)

So your state might define interest earned by a proprietorship to be business income, but that interest belongs on the individual owner's Form

1040, Schedule B.

I've been retired for over a dozen years, so check with your own CPA to be sure this information is still correct. I've not read Pub. 334 in a looong time.

RC

The 'problem' you are having with the integration between Quicken and Turbo-Tax is user-error, of a specific type that my programming teacher used to refer to as Garbage-In-Garbage-Out.

The monthly interest payments in your son's Quicken file were most likely not "to the Chase Savings Account" but instead, FROM his bank. What you posted as a "Description" of "Interest Payment" was most likely a name provided by your son's FI in a transaction download, or even entered by your son himself, and was (I suspect) entered in the PAYEE field -- as Quicken

2006 registers for bank accounts DO NOT HAVE A DESCRIPTION field (the fields are Num, Date, Payee/Category/Memo, Payment, Clr, Deposit, Balance.

You've posted that your son left the category BLANK.

From the Quicken helpfile "When you assign tax-related categories to your Quicken transactions, Quicken applies the correct IRS tax form line item and dollar amount and makes this information available in tax reports and calculation tools. You can export this information to TurboTax"

As pointed out in my reply to your first post... there is no such thing as a "Description" field in Quicken. There is a PAYEE, CATEGORY, and a MEMO field (the memo is hidden if you select single-line display).

The nice 'description' you downloaded from your bank was copied into your Quicken data as a Payee. Your son failed to provide a category for transactions with the payee of 'Interest Income'. He only had to do it once. Quicken has a setting which will fill-in categories for payees.

Ummmm... no. Quicken has no control over the information provided by your financial institution. While Chase may send data indicating that monthly interest is a deposit from the payee 'Interest Income' other banks may leave the payee (what you called 'description') blank. Still others might use other names, such as INT or INTEREST or Int Income.

In what way do you think the data is tagged?

"R. C. White" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@corp.supernews.com:

thanks for the clarification

scott s. .

"L" wrote in news:47ac8442$1$15194$ snipped-for-privacy@cv.net:

I've found that downloading cleared checks is a hassle, mainly for those which use the "check21" ACH entries. My bank doesn't provide the check number for these and they typically don't match with register transactions and have to be manually matched.

scott s. .

Again, this is a problem with your bank and not Quicken.

Oilcan