Reckon Accounts Personal Plus 2015 - problems with Tax line item files

David H

I'm using Reckon Accounts Personal Plus 2015 Release R1, Australian Edition.

I've found what appear to be problems in the Tax Line Item files TAX.PRI, TAX.SCD and TAX.THP. These files are Revision 012.

The problems surfaced recently when I created a new Category to record transactions related to an ATO tax return item not currently used in Personal Plus.

I was unable to assign the Tax Line Item in the Edit Category dialog. I could select it, but after clicking OK, it didn't show in the Category List Tax Line Item column. When I edited the Category again, the tax line item I'd selected was no longer present in the field. A symptom I noticed was that the text field at the bottom of the Edit Category dialog was not filled out with the Help text, which comes from TAX.THP, when I selected the tax line item from the drop-down.

I checked other tax line items and found that some worked and some didn't.

After quite a bit of analysis, I found:

• Some of the line identifiers in TAX.PRI didn't match the corresponding line identifiers in TAX.SCD. This caused "Standard" line items to not show in the drop-down list. The line item I wanted was, by coincidence, one of those. I edited the line identifiers in TAX.PRI to match the corresponding identifiers in TAX.SCD.
• There were duplicate line identifiers in TAX.SCD and TAX.THP. I assume that the line identifier is used as an index, so they should be the same. I selected unused identifiers for the duplicated identifiers.
• And the problem causing the selection issue: there were spaces on the end of lines in TAX.SCD.

Removing the spaces on the end of the lines in TAX.SCD proved to be the fix that made the selection work.

Note that I did all edits with Quicken not running.

I checked the previous revision files I have, revision 011 dated 8 Aug 2008 and found that TAX.PRI in 011 and 012 are identical, TAX.SCD in 011 has some of the same entries as 012 with trailing spaces and some entries in either one or the other but not both have trailing spaces, and TAX.THP differs between 011 and 012 only in entries changed to match new ATO line items.

So it seems that this problem has either existed for some time or, less likely, that Accounts 2015 is the first version in which the problems with the files have caused a problem selecting Tax Line Items for Categories.

Reckon, if I have actually found an issue, I'd appreciate it if you would correct it and issue new TAX.* files to all users.

There are still some outstanding issues I can't solve:

• It's a shame that the line ID is also used to sequence the Tax Questions on the Tax Schedule report. Because Questions 11 and 12, for example, have line IDs out of sequence with numerically adjacent questions, Question 11 appears between Question 19 & 20 and Question 24 (in my report) and Question 12 appears after DEDUCTIONS. Reckon, it would be really nice if you fixed this, too. Just changing the files probably won't work; you'd probably need to map the old line item IDs to the new IDs and also not break when encountering IDs altered as mine have been. No, I don't expect that would be easy.
• P8 line items are not included in TAX.PRI, so should not be displayed in the Standard line item list. They do. 
• There are two P8 line items in the drop-down line item list that are not in the TAX.SCD file: Unspecified Business Expense and Unspecified Business Income. I can't find where they come from, but I don't use them, so it doesn't matter to me.

I am surprised that I couldn't find some mention of this anywhere. I thought that surely someone would have noticed it by now and reported it. Perhaps I didn't search widely enough.

Reckon FAQs

Hi David,

Welcome to the Reckon Community and thanks for sharing your investigations with us.

Our Developers are looking at your comments now and will provide some feedback soon.


regards,
John

Andrew_7263018

Further to David's post, I have a Tax Schedule report printed 06/07/14, prior to 2015 upgrade, that shows Question 18 Capital Gains (category _RlsdGain).  The same report post upgrade does not show this category.  A Capital Gains report shows the _RlsdGain item.

Trying to add the Tax Question 18 back to the _RlsdGain category (by editing the category) is unsuccessful as David reports above.

Andrew P

David H

John, it's been two months since you responded that your developers would provide some feedback soon.

Is there anything you can tell me?

regards - David

A.E.M. Bobby

Thanks heaps for your post David.  I noticed the exact same issues in my taxation reporting and have resolved the issue using your fix method.  Bad bug to leave in the product.