About using the Tax Planner to estimate taxes

The Quicken Tax Planner is your tax management control center. You can import data from tax software, change your marital status, enter annualized values for certain types of income or expenses, and estimate the amount you owe or the size of your refund.

After you categorize your transactions, you can use the Tax Planner to import data from tax preparation software, enter data that may not be reflected in Quicken transactions (such as marital status or annualized values for certain types of income or expenses), and estimate the amount of taxes you may owe or the size of the refund you may receive.

Notes

Occasionally the IRS changes the information required on IRS tax forms and schedules. Most changes to IRS tax forms occur in January and often affect only specialized forms that most people don't need to file. When this happens, Quicken provides an updated list of tax form assignments (the TAX.SCD file).

If the IRS makes any changes to the forms you file; however, you need to obtain a new copy of the TAX.SCD file. You can get a current copy of this file in new releases or updates of Quicken.

What can I do?

• How do I assemble my tax information?
• Handle multiple copies of the same tax form
• How do I find out my tax situation?
• How do I import a TurboTax data file?
• How do I view my Tax Planner data?
• How do I view Tax Planner details?
• How do I update my tax information in the Tax Planner?
• How do I reset the default values in the Tax Planner?
• How do I manually enter information in the Tax Planner?
• What if the tax withheld in the Tax Planner is too low after a Roth IRA conversion?
• How do I use the Tax Planner Summary page?
• Annualize my Quicken tax data

Frequently asked questions

• Where does the data in the Tax Planner come from?

  The Tax Planner collects information from a variety of sources, evaluates it based on current tax law and your personal financial situation, and then estimates your tax liability (or refund) for the current year. You can import information from your tax software, use information from your Quicken data file, or enter information manually.

  Since your taxes are based on a year's worth of financial information, the Tax Planner makes an educated estimate, called a projection, of the final, year-end total of each tax schedule item; for example, even if it's only the beginning of May, the Tax Planner projects your current year-to-date earnings, or the amount of Social Security tax already withheld, or the amount of interest you've earned on your accounts, to arrive at a total for the year upon which it bases its estimates. One way the Tax Planner can do this is by counting up all the remaining instances of a scheduled transaction (for instance, if you've scheduled your paycheck ) for the rest of the year (this is recommended). Another way is by annualizing current amounts, or saying, in effect, that if you've earned $20,000 by the end of April, you'll earn $60,000 by the end of December. You may also earn a bonus or two over the course of the year; you can add those bonuses to the Tax Planner's total to make the estimate of your taxes even more accurate.

• What currency does the Tax Planner support?
  The Tax Planner supports only U.S. currency. If you use non-U.S. currency accounts, the Quicken tax tools in the Tax Center view of the Planning tab (including the Tax Planner) ignores amounts from these accounts.
• What is the basis for the data in the Tax Planner?
  The data in the Tax Planner is projected for the current tax year. If the projection is based on last year's data, a 3 percent inflation rate per year is used to project future amounts.

This feature is not available in Canada.