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QuickBooks Online’s Sales Tax Tools: The Basics

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Are you paying the correct amount of sales tax to the proper agencies? QuickBooks Online can help.

It’s hard to imagine that small businesses used to have to manage sales tax manually. It was quite a time-intensive process, and it was so easy to make mistakes.

QuickBooks Online can handle the mechanics for you. Its sales tax tools are quite simple; they help set up both single and combined (up to five) rates. Then when you create invoices and other sales forms, you can select the appropriate rate(s). The site does the necessary calculations and includes sales tax in the totals. It also keeps a running tally of how much you owe to taxing agencies.

Bear in mind, though, that absolute accuracy is required for this often-confusing process. States have their own individual requirements, and in some geographical areas, you’ll have to charge county and/or municipal sales tax. So before you start entering rates and charging customers, we should sit down and go over issues like:

  • Whether you need a sales tax permit,
  • How to handle sales in other states,
  • What transactions are exempt from sales tax, and
  • How often – and to whom – you submit the money you’ve collected from customers.

Figure 1: QuickBooks Online simplifies the mechanics of charging sales tax. But let us work with you before you start using them.

This element of accounting is so critical that QuickBooks Online includes a special section devoted to it. To get to the Sales Tax Center, you’d click on Sales Tax in the site’s toolbar.  The page that opens will eventually display information about the sales tax you owe for a specific period and recent payments you’ve made.

It’s the Related Tasks over to the right that we’ll address first. The Edit sales tax settings link opens a small window that asks whether you charge sales tax. It also wants to know whether you want to specify one rate as your default – the rate that fills in automatically when you enter a taxable item on a sales form – and whether all customers, products, and services should be considered taxable.

Note: Even if you choose a default tax rate, you’ll be able to change it on individual forms as needed.

Figure 2: One of the things we’ll do as we help you get started with sales taxes is to make sure that your site settings are correct.

QuickBooks Online will now include a Tax column on sales forms like invoices. After you’ve entered all of your taxable items, you’d look below the line over to the right that says Taxable subtotal. Directly below that is a field where the sales tax rate should appear.

If you’ve created rates and they aren’t showing, you’d click the up-and-down arrow to display the list. Either select the appropriate one or click +Add new. QuickBooks Online would then multiply the taxable subtotal by your tax percentage and enter the result in the box to the right.

Figure 3: Once you’ve entered all of your items and/or services and you have a taxable subtotal, QuickBooks Online will calculate the sales tax payable based on the rate selected.

When you want to see where you stand with your sales tax obligation to date, you can run three reports designed to display this information:

  • Taxable Sales Summary shows a summary of all of the sales to which you’ve assigned a tax rate in your sales forms.
  • Sales Tax Liability Report tells you what you’ve collected in sales tax, as well as what you owe to taxing agencies.
  • Taxable Sales Detail is a more comprehensive version of the Taxable Sales Summary report. Its columns include Date, Transaction Type, Customer, Quantity, Rate, Amount, and Balance.

When sales taxes are due, you will pay them directly from the Sales Tax Center. Its Sales Tax Owed table will display the amounts you owe and to whom. If they’re recorded as a paid bill or a check, they won’t appear in the Recent Sales Tax Payments table.

We can’t emphasize strongly enough the importance of correctly setting up your sales taxes from the start or of meeting the deadlines that your local taxing agencies enforce. Let us know when you want to start implementing this element of QuickBooks Online. We are Certified Quickbooks Pro Advisors. Our Los Angeles QuickBooks CPA firm offers a complete range of QuickBooks consulting, set-up, training and ongoing support to meet the needs of your business. Give us a call at 818-404-1084 to learn more or request a free consultation online.

5 QuickBooks Reports You Need to Run in January

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The new year is about to begin. Does your accounting to-do list look like a clean slate, or are critical tasks from last year still nagging?

Getting all of your accounting tasks done in December is always a challenge. Besides the vacation time you and your employees probably took for the holidays, there are those year-end, Let’s-wrap-it-up-by-December-31 projects.

How did you do last month? Were you ready to move forward when you got back to the office in January? Or did you run out of time and have to leave some accounting chores undone?

Besides paying bills and chasing payments, submitting taxes and counting inventory in December, there’s another item that should have been on your to-do list: creating end-of-year reports. If you didn’t get this done, it’s not too late. It’s important to have this information as you begin the New Year. QuickBooks can provide it.

A Report Dashboard

You may be using the Reports menu to access the pre-built frameworks that QuickBooks offers. Have you ever explored the Report Center, though? You can get there by clicking Reports in the navigation toolbar or Reports | Report Center on the drop-down menu at the top of the screen.

QuickBooks’ Report Center introduces you to all of the software’s report templates and helps you access them quickly.

As you can see in the image above, the Report Center divides QuickBooks’ reports into categories and displays samples of each. Click on one of the tabs at the top if you want to:

  • Memorize a report using any customization you applied.
  • Designate a report as a Favorite
  • See a list of the most Recent reports you ran.
  • Explore reports beyond those included with QuickBooks, Contributed by Intuit or other parties.

Recommended Reports

Here are the reports we think you should run as soon as possible if you didn’t have a chance to in December:

Budget vs Actual

We hope that by now you’ve at least started to create a budget for this coming year. If not, the best way to begin is by looking at how close you came to your numbers last year. QuickBooks actually offers four budget-related reports, but Budget vs Actual is the most important; it tells you how your actual income and expenses compare to what was budgeted.

Budget Overview is just what it sounds like: a comprehensive accounting of your budget for a given period. Profit & Loss Budget Performance is similar to Budget vs Actual. It compares actual to budget amounts for the month, fiscal year-to-date, and annual. Budget vs Actual Graph provides a visual representation of your income and expenses, giving you a quick look at whether you were over or under budget during specific periods.

Income & Expense Graph

You’ve probably been watching your income and expenses all year in one way or another. But you need to look at the whole year in total to see where you stand. This graph shows you both how income compares to expenses and what the largest sources of each are. It doesn’t have the wealth of customization options that other reports due, but you can view it by date, account, customer, and class.

A/R Aging Detail

QuickBooks’ report templates offer generous customization options.

Which customers still owe you money from last year? How much? How far past the due date are they? This is a report you should be running frequently throughout the year. Right now, though, you want to clean up all of the open invoices from last year. A/R Aging Detail will show you who is current and who is 31-60, 61-90, and 91+ days old. You might consider sending Statements to those customers who are way past due.

A/P Aging Detail

Are you current on all of your bills? If so, this report will tell you so. If some bills slipped through the cracks in December, contact your vendors to let them know you’re on it.

Sales by Item Detail

January is a good time to take a good look at what sold and what didn’t before you start placing orders for this coming year. We hope you’re watching this closely throughout the year, but looking at monthly and annual totals will help you identify trends – as well as winners and losers.

QuickBooks offers some reports in the Company & Financial and Accountant & Taxes categories that you can create, but which really require expert analysis. These include Balance Sheet, Trial Balance, and Statement of Cash Flows. You need the insight they can offer on at least a quarterly basis, if not monthly. Connect with us, and we can set up a schedule for looking at these.

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January is a good time to run reports you didn’t have time to in December. Talk to us about which are most important.

QuickBooks provides templates for some reports that you probably need help analyzing, like Balance Sheet. We can help with these.

Have you explored QuickBooks’ Report Center? It offers a variety of tools and guidance for managing reports.

Did you create a budget last year? Now’s the time to run QuickBooks’ Budget vs Actual report. You can contact our Los Angeles CPA Firm for all your QuickBooks accounting needs. Call us today at 818-404-1084 or request a free consultation online.