Software > Accounting > 103.4 - Sales Tax Tracking
Sales Tax is typically paid monthly, quarterly or annually depending on your location. We deposit sales tax as part of gross sales/proceeds. We don't account for it separately in our accounting software.
When sales tax is due, we pull our sales tax numbers from our Point of Sale reporting system, we record them here, and then we make our sales tax payments via the online portal for a given state.
The payment to the Sales Tax Authority is then recorded in our Accounting software as a reduction of sales (contra sales account). It could also be recorded as a negative sale or as a positive expense if you wanted to, but the better way to do it is as a contra sales account.
This workbook has 2 working tabs:
When sales tax is due, we pull our sales tax numbers from our Point of Sale reporting system, we record them here, and then we make our sales tax payments via the online portal for a given state.
The payment to the Sales Tax Authority is then recorded in our Accounting software as a reduction of sales (contra sales account). It could also be recorded as a negative sale or as a positive expense if you wanted to, but the better way to do it is as a contra sales account.
This workbook has 2 working tabs:
- Filing instructions
- Sales Tax Report
Filing Instructions
Process that we don't engage in daily or weekly are much harder to gain memory and mastery over. We document our sales tax filing process on the first tab of the workbook with all relevant information so we don't need to remember anything...
2017 Sales Tax Reporting
As mentioned, this is just a scratch pad really. We pull sales tax totals per month from our Point of Sale system, we total those, and we use the tax rate to reverse out the total sales value for the report. If you have to track sales tax in different counties or states, this is more complex, but as long as you build in the proper functionality in your point of sale solution or elsewhere, that is not that much more complex. Just add 3 columns for each separate tax area, or you made need to build out a slightly more complex worksheet system.