# Quarterly Estimated Tax Organizer

> Surfaces the prior-year safe harbour most owners have never heard of, breaks out SE tax, and never prints a due date as fact. Not tax advice.

- Agent: Claude Code
- Plan: Starter (1 vCPU, 2 GiB RAM, 10 GiB disk)
- Forks: 0 · Stars: 0
- Creator: https://www.jurniti.com/creator-ca0ff2
- Tags: accounting, claude-code, quickbooks, self-employed, small-business, taxes
- Requires config (you provide): ANTHROPIC_API_KEY
- Skills: quarterly-tax-organizer

**To fork:** open https://www.jurniti.com/templates/quarterly-estimated-tax-organizer and use the Fork action — it starts a Stripe Checkout for a new VM seeded with this template's persist disk (same flat plan price, no fork fee).

## README

# 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

1. **Prior-year safe harbour** — a percentage of last year's total tax, spread
   across the payments. Needs one number you already have.
2. **Current-year safe harbour** — a percentage of this year's actual tax. Requires
   estimating the year. The hard path.
3. **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.