Previous Year Tax Return

Hello  JFR_CPACA,

Glad to hear from you again. I hope all is well on your end. It's vital you a have a record showing your sales tax return for January - December 2020 and I'll be happy to share more information on this. 

QuickBooks offers a powerful tax module which makes it simple to keep track of your taxes. Based on what you've described, I recommend using the Audit log on your account. The Audit log tracks user activity, changes to settings, customers, suppliers, and employees.

Here are the steps on how to access the audit log:

1. Go to Settings ⚙ and select Audit Log.
2. Select Filter.
3. Use the fields on the Filter panel to choose the appropriate User, Date, or Events filter to narrow the results.
4. Select Apply.  

With this information, you can see how the unwanted changes appeared on your account and depending on the transactions, you can restore them right from your Audit Log screen. In case you need to record the return again, you can do this by clicking Taxes from the left navigation menu and looking for Prepare return under the Returns tab. I'll attach an image below for visual reference. 

Give these steps a try and let me know how you make out. I'll be here to assist. Otherwise, I wish you a prosperous year for you and your business!

I'm sorry, this did not help me; I am the only one working in the database.  This is the first tax cycle in the database and it just vanished.  The prepare return was still available on December 31st and just disappeared on January 1st. 

Hi there JFR_CPACA,

I hear what you're saying and thank you for replying to this thread with some additional detail. What you're describing is a common confusion but luckily it has a simple fix. I want to explain how you can easily get back to preparing your return for January to December, 2020. 

When the new year arrived, QuickBooks detected that you'd be entering a new filing period. As a result, the filing that you saw on the Sales Tax page with Prepare return likely changed to reflect January to December 2021. Since you won't have filed for the current year as of yet, fixing this is easy. Simply select Prepare return even though the wrong period is indicated. A new window will open to display the return. Along the top you'll see a dropdown for Filing period as well as fields for Start date, End date, and Filing date. 

To change the current filing, simply use the fields for Start and End date to select January 1, 2020 and December 31, 2020. Once you've changed the dates the data will change to reflect the period you've entered. Now you can take a look at each line to ensure it's correct, make any required adjustments, and hit Mark as filed.

Let me know if this doesn't quite hit the mark. It's important to me that you're able to get to work on your sales tax filing promptly.