How do I turn off Sales Tax??

It even added sales tax to previously paid invoices!! Also, it continues to add tax to new invoices, despite the fact that I have: 1. made all tax agencies inactive in the Sales Tax settings, 2. marked all my products and services as non-taxable in both Quickbooks and Jobber (the software where invoices are created and from which they are synced to QB).

This is absolutely untenable and infuriating. There's no way I'm going to go into every invoice from the past and future and manually turn off tax. This is so stupid, there has to be a way to turn this off entirely.

Hi there. We understand disabling Sales Taxes is important to your business, and we appreciate your patience as we work towards making it available. I want to share some information and guide you through what to do.

Once you turn on the Automated Sales Tax feature and added it to invoices you can no longer disable it.

The option to turn off Based on location feature is currently unavailable in QuickBooks Online. I recommend manually editing the invoices and selecting a 0% rate to remove the automated taxes. If this rate isn't available, you can create a custom rate and use it to calculate the sales tax while creating your invoices. I'll show you how:

To add the rate:

1. Go to the Taxes menu and select Sales tax settings.

2. From the Custom rates section, click Add rate.

3. Hit on Single or Combined and enter the Name of the custom rate.

4. Choose the Agency you file payments to and enter the Rate. 

5. Press Save. 

To use the rate on invoices:

1. Open the invoices you want to edit one by one.
2.  On the Select tax rate section, click on the drop-down and choose 0%.
3. Fill out all other needed information.
4. Once done, click on Save and close. See the image below for guidance:

If you're all good, feel free to access this module to find out more details on what you owe: Check how much sales tax you owe in QuickBooks Online.

Keep in touch so we can help you further with taxes, invoices, or QuickBooks. We'll make sure to respond as soon as we can. Keep safe.

This has got to be a joke. I refuse to believe there is not a way to turn off sales tax.

I have hundreds of invoices affected by this issue, there is no way I'm going to be able to both update all existing invoices and also modify every new invoice that is created ad infinitum — it'd take me less time to just create a new QB account and start from scratch. Please tell me there's some way around this limitation.

This makes no sense! There should be a way to turn off sales tax! Why is that not an option??

Hello there, @SOES.

I acknowledge your feedback about turning off sales tax in QuickBooks Online (QBO). As mentioned by my colleague Mich_S above, you can no longer turn off the automated sales tax once it's turned on.

I know that the option to turn off sales tax is beneficial to you and your business, especially when you're not using sales tax. As a workaround, you can consider creating a custom rate with 0% so QuickBooks won't calculate sales tax. To do so, you can follow the steps provided above.

On the other hand, I'd recommend submitting feedback directly to our product engineers. They may look into this suggestion further and consider adding the option in QuickBooks Online (QBO). To submit feedback, you can go to the Gear icon and select Feedback. Then, enter your suggestion and click Submit Feedback.

You can also visit our Customer Feedback page. This will help you track the status of your product request and get the latest updates from our developers. Updates such as how the recent enhancement made to QBO helps our business owners, like you.

Please touch base with me here for all of your QuickBooks needs. I'm always happy to help.

I have submitted feedback multiple times on this issue. To have the Import Invoices feature turned off is insane. Surely you can't expect your customers to manually enter hundreds of invoices!! Are your programmers incapable of making adjustments allowing the sales taxes featured to be turned off? That seems like something students at a community college coding class could handle! 

We also need to have Purchase Orders appear on invoices because our customers require it. We created a custom field but the import feature (when it used to work) doesn't populate custom fields. Please either make Purchase Orders a Standard Field for invoices to they can be matched for bulk uploads OR allow custom fields to be matched. I find it hard to believe that many of QuickBooks Online customers don't need for Purchase Orders to appear on invoices. We are now having to go in and edit hundreds of invoices manually which defeats the purpose of the import feature (when it used to work). 

These issues are negatively affecting our business in a serious way. It needs to be fixed now. Please respond. 

P.S. Please turn off the annoying puzzle that is now required to login to QBO. I also have not activated 2-step verification but it started making me do it anyway a couple of weeks ago. Please turn this off! 

This is ridiculous.  I can't believe how much time I'm wasting on this when our entity is a non-profit with a sales tax exemption - now I can't even edit checks without triggering a request for sales tax!

Hi @Mark_R and @Mich_S ,

We have the custom rates set up in QBO for Wholesale and retail and have updated the customers appropriately.  When we create an invoice directly in QBO this functions perfectly.  Two weeks ago we turned on an integration with Ekos (business management software for the beverage manufacturing industry).  Because Ekos tracks our raw ingredients, conversion to inventory, and waste, it also now manages our invoices.  Since we have turned on the integration all invoices post with the Based on Location, sales tax, which is not applicable to our Wholesale business.  

We have been troubleshooting this issue for over a week and we continue to get the same result, based on Location Sales tax.  Are there any solutions for what we are facing?  Any recommendations outside of manual intervention?

Thank you,

Liann

Welcome to QuickBooks Community, @TS Delaney. 

Congratulations on successfully integrating Ekos with QuickBooks Online. I appreciate all the troubleshooting you did to fix the Location Sales tax calculations on your invoices. Since you're not going to use this for the Wholesale business, I'm here to walk you through turning off this feature.

The ability to disable the Sales Tax feature has been available to all customers on both Classic and Automated Sales Tax since September 13, 2023. This is possible if you haven't created a transaction with Sales Tax in the past.

However, if you have any Sales Tax Transactions, you need to delete these first before trying to turn off Sales Tax. This means simply removing the tick from the taxable box on the invoice will not work. Before doing so, make sure to take note of them.

Here's how:

1. On the left pane, go to the Reports menu and search for Sales Tax Liability Report.
2. Set the report period to All Dates to show all agencies and tax items.
3. Select the Taxable Amount, to open a report with all transactions that have global sales tax on them. To continue, you will need to do the following:

1. Make a note of the transaction(s)
2. Delete each transaction(s)
3. Turn sales tax off (see the steps above)
4. Re-enter the deleted transaction(s).

Once done, follow the steps below for the Automated Sales Tax experience:

1. Go to the Taxes menu, then select Sales Tax.
2. Press the Sales Tax Settings.
3. Tap the Turn off Sales Tax button at the upper right corner.
4. Click Yes to confirm.

On the other hand, these instruction is for the Classic or Manual Sales Tax experience:

1. Go to Taxes, then select Sales Tax.
2. If you see the option to go to the new sales tax experience, select Do it later.
3. Under Related Tasks, select Edit sales tax settings.
4. Under Do you charge sales tax?, select No if you don't charge sales tax.
5. Click on Save.

If you need to deactivate a tax rate or a tax agency in the program, refer to this article: Delete sales tax rates and agencies in QuickBooks Online.

With this information, you should be able to turn off Sales Tax along with calculations Based on Location. If you need more help navigating within the product, let me know. It'll be my pleasure to help you.

Thank you for the response.  Based on the above can I delete all the automatic "tax by location" transactions and leave all the custom tax postings?  Will this allow me to turn off the Sales Tax?

Hi, TS Delany.

Thanks for getting back to us. I'm here to help you turn off the automatic Sales Tax feature in QuickBooks Online (QBO).

Turning off the automatic Sales Tax feature is only possible if there are no transactions that include sales tax, as mentioned by my colleague above. In your situation, you will need to delete all transactions, including those with customer tax postings, to proceed.

After completing the deletion of all transactions with sales tax, you can refer to the steps provided by my colleague, JamaicaA, on how to disable the feature. These steps include instructions for both the new and old QuickBooks Online (QBO) experience.

In case you need it, I'll add these articles that tackles managing sales tax in QBO for future reference:

• Set up your sales tax in QuickBooks Online.
• Set up where you collect sales tax in QuickBooks Online.

Please let me know if you have additional questions about this or anything else. I'll be here to assist. Take care.

All of the transactions listed in the Sales Tax Liability Report have $0.00 next to them and the grand total is also $0.00. When I try to turn off sales tax, it says it can't since taxes have been collected. Obviously, $0.00 has been collected. Do I have to delete and resubmit every transaction even though the amount is $0.00?

I want to make it up to you by ensuring you get the right information and support about turning off the Automatic Sales Tax, mghubbard14. 

As mentioned by my colleague above, before turning off the Sales Tax feature, it is necessary to ensure that there are no transactions involving sales tax. 

Yes, you'll have to delete all transactions, including those with customer tax postings, in order to proceed. You can follow the steps provided by my colleague @JamaicaA on how to turn off the Sales Tax feature. 

I've added some articles for more details about setting up sales tax and how QuickBooks computes sales taxes:

• Learn how QuickBooks Online calculates sales tax
• Set up and use automated sales tax in QuickBooks Online

In case you want to turn it on again, simply go to the Taxes menu and use the automated sales tax feature.

I'm just a post away if you have any other questions about disabling sales tax in QBO. Take care and have a great day!

Hi @FritzF 

We have a few years of custom tax postings, so it sounds like this isn't an option.  For us, EKOS is our invoice POS and it's properly posting the Wholesale tax (different rate than sales tax), but when the invoice data interfaces to QB, QBO is overriding the wholesale tax and posting tax by location (sales tax).  

Each of our customers are set up with their specific tax rate (wholesale) but still QB is chasing the rate with the integration.  Based on this information, do we have any other options?  Could there be an integration fix from QBO side?  Ekos has exhausted their troubleshooting.

Thank you,

Liann 

This is ridiculous. The sales receipts from Square come in with the wrong date,  so when I try to manually correct that (which I used to be able to do, even though it was irritating),  I now have to 1) delete the deposit first, 2) manually correct the date and then Quickbooks CHANGES THE SALES TAX DUE.  Why would changing the date on a sales receipt change the amount of tax due????  This software has so many bugs I seriously doubt it is tested before it is released. I used Quickbooks desktop for 16 years without issue. 3 months with Quickbooks Online and I am now searching for an alternative because this software is garbage.

Thank you for reaching out to the Community, @MLCBookkeeper.

I understand how you feel about having to delete and manually write your sales receipts because of the changes in sales tax. Let's work this out so you can run your sales receipts without problem.

Let's try logging in to your account and writing the sales receipts manually using an incognito or private browser. To get this done, here's how:

• Google Chrome: Ctrl + Shift + N
• Mozilla Firefox: Ctrl + Shift + P
• Safari: Command + Option + P

You can also try clearing your regular browser's cache because it can help you access your websites properly. You can also use another accessible browser to correct your sales tax without any changes.

If the issue persists, I can endorse you to our Technical support team. They have the tools that help you correct you with sales receipts without any changes from sales tax. Here's how:

1. Sign in with your QuickBooks Online company.
2.  Click on the Help icon in your upper right corner. 
3. Select Search, then click Contact Us.
4. Write your issue or concern and click Continue.
5. Choose a way to connect with them.

If you want to know more about sales tax and how it works, you can try to read this article: Learn how QuickBooks Online calculates sales tax.

Feel free to leave a comment below if you have any concerns regarding this issue. We're always ready to help. 

This is not a browser issue. This is an automatic sales tax issue. Worst mistake I ever made was enabling it, and now I can’t disable it. It doesn’t work properly.

This is not a browser issue. It is an automatic sales tax issue. Enabling it was a huge mistake and I wish I could turn it off. It doesn’t work properly, and based on a quick search online, it hasn’t worked right in 3 years. 

THIS IS INSANE! LET US TURN OFF SALES TAX! FIRST OFF IT WOULD HAVE BEEN NICE TO KNOW YOU CANNOT TURN IT OFF IF YOU "LEARN MORE" ON ACCIDENT. FIX IT PLEASE! ALSO KILL THE MODERN VIEW!!

I completely understand your frustration with the process you went through and the trouble of turning off the Sales Tax feature in QuickBooks Online, @MLCBookkeeper. I'd be glad to help you achieve your task.

We can definitely turn off this feature but it's worth noting that as my colleagues mentioned above, it is crucial to verify that there are no transactions involving sales tax before disabling it. You can follow the steps shared by JamaicaA above to delete these transactions. Once done, you can proceed to turn it off.

Here's how:
 

1. Go to the Taxes menu, then select Sales Tax.
2. Press the Sales Tax Settings.
3. Tap the Turn off Sales Tax button at the upper right corner.
4. Click Yes to confirm.

If you're done deleting these transactions but still unable to turn off the feature, would you mind telling us if you receive any error message when trying to do so? Any additional information would be greatly appreciated.

For future reference, I'm adding these articles to learn more about managing sales tax in QuickBooks Online:

• Set up your sales tax in QuickBooks Online.
• Set up where you collect sales tax in QuickBooks Online.

 The Community is open 24/7 if you have other questions or concerns. Feel free to leave a reply below. 

I spent THREE HOURS on the phone with QB today. They blamed everything and everyone except themselves for the fact that their software doesn’t work. This is accounting software. It is not unreasonable to expect that accounting software doesn’t change sales tax when a date is updated on a receipt. I have zero confidence in any of the reporting. And all of the automation has cost me DAYS. What used to take me an hour a month has taken me 12 hours so far in the last two days.