I use QuickBooks Desktop 2016 with industry edition nonprofit. I never bought subsequent editions 'cuz, you know, nothing about double-entry bookkeeping has changed since it was invented by the Venetians. The bank feeds and payroll subscriptions were three years only. I am doing without the features that required a subscription and didn't bother buying the 2019 version. I get constant "This program has expired!" warnings.
Even if I wanted it, QuickBooks no longer sells a desktop version. Like so many other programs, they require subscriptions and I will not use commercial software with a drop-dead subscription date. Why do users put up with it? This is a terrible idea.
QuickBooks on line is a rather different program that I don't care for and never switched to it, but that's subscription access too.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Intuit may "unintentionally" deactivate my software at some point and I'll have to switch to something else.
One of the people whose 1040 I do had stopped balancing her checkbook, so I decided to try GnuCash for that purpose and to see if it's an acceptable replacement for QuickBooks.
I can output a Tax Schedule Report and export TXF but it's not CSV or another spreadsheet format and I'm not sure what I'm looking at in order to build a translation to import it into my spreadsheet. I can output the entire thing as a spreadsheet but I didn't see a way to limit it to just the transactions I needed for tax purposes.
I'm the only one on Usenet, I think, using spreadsheets for tax preparation and not commercial tax preparation software.
I didn't see a way to add TXF codes, especially if I needed to output a tax report to prepare a 990.
Also, I had to link an account to a TXF code; there was no way to link particular entries to a TXF code. That was no big deal. I just added accounts to reflect the way GnuCash had set up TXF codes. Annoyingly, a subset of TXF codes were available for broad categories of Asset, Liability, Income, and Expense. To reverse an entry in another account, I'd use a contra account in QuickBooks. An example of this is a requirement to put the same information on two different lines in the tax form but to keep from double counting on the books. A contra account wouldn't be linked to a tax line.
In GnuCash, for instance, if I needed a contra expense account to be linked to a TXF code, I had to create an income account instead, otherwise the appropriate TXF code wasn't offered as a choice.
Inconvenient but I figured out the work around.
One set of issues took a while to figure out. I wasn't able to put the
2023 income tax on a cash basis, so I did it on an accrual basis. I looked up a few recommendations on line and apparently everybody does it this way. I do it this way for payroll taxes, of course, but income taxes are irrelevant to the nonprofit organizations I do books for. If any have UBTI, the 990-T is essentially a business tax return and income taxes do indeed apply, but that's another matter.
I entered the liability for 2023 taxes as of December 31. If I needed to annualize income for the purpose of Form 2210 Schedule AI, I'd have entered quarterly liability dates. Schedule AI has a two-month second quarter and a four-month fourth quarter. I hate that schedule.
Liability is increased with a credit. What to put on the debit? I wanted to avoid the offset to equity which one is not supposed to do but was unavoidable if I did this on a cash basis. Unless someone has an idea?
On an accrual basis, I put in the tax expense as of December 31, so that debit offset the credit to the tax liability.
She had taxes withheld from her IRA distributions. Now, withholding is more of a contra liability than an asset, but there was no matching TXF code to use for either. GnuCash has codes associated with the IRA distribution as reported on 1099-R, so I used that TXF code for a withholding expense account. To avoid double-counting, I adjusted the tax expense. All this was dated December 31 as well.
Still another problem. IRA distributions are income, and I assigned the TXF code associated with the 1099-R to an income account.
This double counts the asset! Distributions were mostly transfers (via a trust account and then into her checking account or a non-IRA investment asset) and the withholding.
I had to think about this. It occurred to me that IRA distributions are deferred compensation. The monies put into the IRA in the first place from salary or wages weren't earned income. The IRA account is therefore liable for the deferred compensation.
On each transfer's date, the trust account asset was debited and the IRA account asset was credited. The distribution account liability was debited and the distribution account income was credited. As previously stated, this income account used the TXF code associated with the
1099-R.
On December 31, on the debit side, there's two 2023 tax expense accounts, one for the withholding and one for the balance due, and a credit to the income tax liability. There's a debit to the 2023 tax liability and a credit to the IRA asset. There's a debit to the distribution liability and a credit to distribution income.
Writing a check to pay taxes due with the return debited the 2023 tax liability bringing it to a zero balance and credited the checking account asset.
The solution, taking in to account some inflexibility in GnuCash, was to accrue the tax liability and expense on December 31, to consider distributions from the IRA as both debiting a liability and as income, and taxes paid with the return as debiting the tax liability.
After calculating total tax on the return, I had to adjust the tax liability and expense to actual numbers.
She was slightly underwithheld by a few hundred dollars to avoid the underpayment of estimated taxes penalty. I noticed that one could simply request IRS to consider waiving the entire penalty by checking Box A and submiting page 1 only and not Schedule AI to annualize income with an attachment stating reasonable cause (blaming the custodian of her IRA for the small tax underprojection), so I did that. While the penalty would be small, I'd rather avoid dealing with future correspondence.