why I use Quicken (part 3) - finish your taxes faster and maximum your deductions

Here are the first 2 parts:
Part 1)why I use Quicken

Part 2) end of the month Quicken activities

I'm almost done with my taxes! Every year, my taxes gets more and more complicated and the number of forms get higher and higher. I suppose, in some strange way, that is a good thing. I rather be paying taxes than not. Yes, I still do my own taxes. Yes, I pay an accountant to do it over again.

Quicken help me to organize my spending records so it's much easier to figure out my expenses and deductions for tax. All through out the year, I mark the business related income and expenses. By this time of year, I ran an income / expense report in Quicken, exported the data to Excel. I do a bit more data clean up in Excel and then the data is ready to for TurboTax. I never really liked to TurboTax import from Quicken feature, it's alway too much or too little. It's much easier to organize the data in Excel.

To maximum your deductions, you have to track every single business related transactions. Quicken helps you do that a little bit at a time, through out the year. Instead of trying to go through a box of receipts and trying to remember the reasons afterward, when you're in a hurry to meet the deadline. Never a good idea to do thing last minute, especially bad when lot of money is involved.