I am shocked by how hard of hearing Quickbooks support is. The sales tax issue is multifold. I will restate our issues but I doubt they will hear.
On the first level is the fact that most of us here think they way it should work is, if a customer account is not-taxable, then all the items on their invoices should automatically be recorded as non-taxable sales for the sale tax agency that is listed on the invoice. We shouldn't have to manually uncheck each line item.
The second level, is the the reports suck. If a customer is not taxeable, and you don't or forget to do the "work around" by unchecking the taxable checkbox on each invoice line item, then those line item sales are recorded as taxed even though you didn't collect anything messing up the reports royally. So like another user said, it takes us extra time to then review every invoice transaction to make sure they are correct, especially if you have more than one person responsible for issuing invoices. (a trick that helps me is there is notes field in our customer records in which I put a notation about their exemption, and that shows up on our invoice template as "internal customer notes (hidden)" which reminds me to uncheck all the tax boxes on the line items)
The third level is the automatic calculation. It is based on shipping location which is as it should be, but if you don't watch the shipping address on invoices, or don't enter it at all it does default to your location as support as said, but that can mess up reports as well, and it can make things even harder to correct and keep on top of if you deal with sales tax agencies that report on different time periods such as NJ and NY. NJ does regular calendar quarters, but NY is screwy and offsets their quarters by a month. I never use automatic calculation. I just don't trust it.
The forth level of issue, is for those of us who pay extra subscription fees to use classes. I've been asking for years to be able to add a class field to sales tax adjustments, and they still can't manage to add that one simple field. In addition there is no way to edit those entries them once they are filed. I've had to use two work arounds over the years. I used to make my sales tax adjustments manually via a journal entry before I "paid" the sales tax in QBO, but lately QBO has been messing up with the account to which they internally deal with sales tax (fifth level of issue). So my adjustments that used to show up in the pay sales tax form as a credit, now do not. Now my work around of this issue is to just let QBO back end do its thing with adjustments, and drop them in and un-classed way, then I do journal entry later to take it out of un-classed and give it the proper class. Of course this will mess up reports that view active classes versus zero.
The fifth level issue, is they keep messing with the chart of accounts behind the scenes. We deal with only two state sales tax agencies, yet I now have 8 sale tax accounts in my chart of accounts. Granted some of that weirdness may have been from our migration from Quickbooks for Mac to QBO, but I'm 99% positive that some of those accounts 'appeared' after I have been using QBO for at least a year, breaking my journal entry adjustment fix.
I find two things funny. One I never had any of these issues with Quickbooks for Mac desktop, and I used it for decades. Two, I recently had an interaction on the phone with someone from support who admitted the sale tax module is the one module everyone in support hates. This person was great, the first support person from quickbooks who really seemed to care, listen, and try to help as best he could. Unfortunately he, nor the three other support people I was bounced to could help with that issue. Which since I'm on a rant, I will mention. I have a customer that sent me a 1099 through one of Intuit services, but they used a capital letter in my email address, my account login is the same email address but all lowercase. Lowercase makes sense because think of the mess if email addresses were cap sensitive. Well, intuits system did not like that and I couldn't retrieve the 1099. Their support solution, I have to create another email address and get the client to send it to that new address. Is this going to happen every year, every customer? How many logins will I have to keep track of to get my 1099s? Then I found other issues within that system. What a mess.......
