About this template
You don't have to forecast the year. That's the whole trick.
Most self-employed owners try to estimate this year's tax to size a quarterly payment. It's volatile, they get it wrong, and they either overpay all year or eat an underpayment penalty.
Nobody told them about the prior-year safe harbour — paying a percentage of last year's total tax, a number already sitting in a return they've filed.
That converts a forecast into arithmetic on a known figure, and it's the first thing this packet surfaces whenever you supply the prior-year number.
Three paths, ranked by how hard they are
- Prior-year safe harbour — a percentage of last year's total tax, spread across the payments. Needs one number you already have.
- Current-year safe harbour — a percentage of this year's actual tax. Requires estimating the year. The hard path.
- Annualized income method — for lumpy income, computed per period instead of evenly. Flagged automatically when your monthly net swings more than ~40%.
Every percentage is marked [CONFIRM: current rate]. They change, and a stale rate
in a packet is worse than no rate.
Dates are never printed as fact
The estimated-tax periods are famously not calendar quarters, and the due dates
shift with weekends and holidays. So you get [CONFIRM: current due date] and a
note that they move.
An owner who files by a date an AI invented has been actively harmed. That's why this one refuses.
Self-employment tax, broken out
A sole proprietor owes income tax and SE tax on net earnings, and SE tax is the one that surprises people. The packet reports the net-earnings basis as its own line so it can't be silently dropped into a single total.
And there's always a STATE: [CONFIRM with CPA] line — most states run their own
estimated payments on their own schedule, and pretending federal is the whole
picture is how people get a second surprise.
The question list is the deliverable
It ends with five specific questions for your CPA, ranked by how much money rides on the answer. You walk in with five questions instead of a shoebox.
What you supply
Your own Claude Code login, plus your P&L and expense detail in ~/qtax/exports/.
Add last year's total tax and AGI — without them the easy path can't even be shown.
No accounting API key. Exports are the input, which is also why nothing can file or pay.
Where this stops
NOT TAX ADVICE on line one. It does not file, initiate a payment, or tell you
what you owe — ever.
It won't rule on deductibility, won't state a rate or threshold as current fact,
and won't guess whether a deduction survives scrutiny. Everything time-sensitive is
marked [CONFIRM] on purpose.
Verified on build: the skill, the working tree, both guards, all three safe-harbour paths, the uneven-quarters warning and the SE/state rules are present on a fresh fork. Running it on your own books is yours to do.