Verifying tax line amounts

Before you fill out your tax forms, make sure that QuickBooks has a record of all your tax-related income and expenses for the taxable year. QuickBooks provides two preset reports — the income tax summary report and the income tax detail report — to help you verify each tax line amount.

To verify tax line amounts:

  1. Choose Reports > Accountants & Taxes > Income Tax Summary.
  2. When the report appears, make sure that the date range shown in the Dates field corresponds to the tax period you want the report to cover. If the date range is incorrect, choose the correct date range from the list. Example
  3. At the end of the report, double-click the amount for “Tax line unassigned (income/expense).” What this amount represents
  4. In the report that appears, look for transactions that should be included in the totals you report to the IRS. When you find a transaction, note the name of the income or expense account shown in the Account column.
  5. Assign the appropriate tax line to each account you found:
  6. After you have corrected any missing or incorrect tax line assignments, click in the tax summary report window. Check the amounts shown for each tax line.

    The report should reflect all the changes you made. For example, if the report originally showed nothing for “Schedule A: Cash charity contributions” because no tax line was assigned to your Charitable Contributions expenses account, you should now see a line and an amount for “Schedule A: Cash charity contributions” in the report.

  7. If some of the amounts seem incorrect, choose Reports > Accountants & Taxes > Income Tax Detail. This new report is an expanded version of the tax summary report. It lists the amounts from which QuickBooks calculated each tax line amount.

    Tip: If you need to investigate only a single amount, double-click the amount in the tax summary report to create a QuickZoom report. The QuickZoom report displays the same list that you would see in the tax detail report, but only for the amount in question.

  8. In the tax detail report or the QuickZoom report, look for amounts that shouldn't be included in a tax line's total.

    If an amount doesn't belong, you probably distributed the amount to the wrong income or expense account.

  9. Change the income or expense account for each incorrectly distributed amount:
  10. When you are certain that the amounts in the tax summary report are correct, press imageP to print the report.