Quicken 2009: The Missing Manual

Chapter 10. Taxes and Insurance

Taxes and insurance are stunningly complicated systems. They’re also unavoidable, unless you want the taxman in hot pursuit or heaps of medical bills to pay. Quicken can’t make these systems any simpler, but it can keep track of the taxes you owe or the refunds you’re due, as well as the numerous types of insurance transactions you make, such as funding a flexible spending account, paying for medical expenses, and depositing reimbursement checks.

As you learned in Chapters Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, Quicken’s powers come mainly from accounts and categories. These two features are also your foundation for tracking tax and insurance transactions. Quicken sets up several types of accounts like IRAs with the tax-related settings you need to track your nontaxable income and tax deductions. With these settings in place, Quicken knows which accounts to include in the tax reports you run.

You can also assign Quicken categories to specific lines on tax forms and schedules. As long as you assign tax-related transactions to the appropriate categories, you can whip out reports of your taxable income and tax deductions in no time. Quicken even has tools you can use to plan your finances so that you pay the least amount of tax (legally) possible and find all the deductions you qualify for.

Following money through the insurance maze can seem like a shell game. Contributions to pretax savings accounts and insurance premiums here, payments for reimbursable expenses there, ...