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JoeOps
Level 2

Workaround/Hack for Sales Tax Prepayments

Hello Community!

As many here know, the QBO Sales Tax Center does not support monthly payments for quarterly filers.

I thought I would share how we've decided to work around this limitation until QuickBooks notices that like half its users can't use the Sales Tax Center as designed (Yes I have provided feedback many times.)

Simple as it sounds, we just changed our Sales Tax Setting to Monthly Filing Frequency. This makes the "Record Payments" button available after the month ends and we use this to record the payments we make every month. Doing it this way allows us to match it easily to a checking account transaction.

When it comes time to make the quarterly payment, we use the Sales Tax Liability Report adjusted manually to the quarter and our previous monthly estimates to make the filings. I have to say the NYDOTF portal makes this especially simple, other states not as much.

We manage the status of the filings in our project management system (Asana) and completely ignore what the sales tax center tells us about the filings themselves. This allows us to use all the other benefits of sales tax automation in QBO without being stuck on this one problem.

We've been through a full quarter with all our quarterly filing clients this way and have yet to find a downside. Curious if anyone else is doing this or using other workarounds?

Cheers!
Joe

4 Comments 4
MarkAngeloG
QuickBooks Team

Workaround/Hack for Sales Tax Prepayments

Hi there, Joe!

 

Thank you for bringing this up on the Community page for everyone. Your input is greatly appreciated and will be very helpful for everyone.

 

At Intuit QuickBooks, we strive to provide our customers with the best possible experience, and your feedback helps us achieve that goal. We're committed to continuously improving our products and services to meet your needs. We assure everyone that our product engineers always pay attention to your feedback.

 

We appreciate your business needs and are excited to serve you in the future. If you have any queries related to QuickBooks Online, please feel free to post them here in the Community.

Jfuller13
Level 1

Workaround/Hack for Sales Tax Prepayments

Thanks! I will try your workaround. 

 

The state of CA requires monthly pre-payments for quarterly filers. The QBO advice I have found is to use the "add an adjustment" feature which only allows you to post your payment to an expense account and not the liability account. This is not helpful!

 

I've even watched videos of people advising just to wait until the quarter ends to record your payments from previous months. For someone who likes to reconcile their checking account monthly, this is not helpful either!

abagleycpa
Level 1

Workaround/Hack for Sales Tax Prepayments

This really needs to be fixed by QBO, a verify inadequate system.  They should allow payments to be posted to the period when its still open.  Monthly isn't a great option especially if there are adjustments to the months before the quarter end.  My hack work around is I have a secondary sales tax payable account. I post the payment to there.  I also have a sales tax adjustment account in income.  Then in the sales tax system I post a "prior prepayment" and post it to that account.  Then I post a JE to reduce the sales tax payable account. Alternatively you can set it up as an expense and record it to a sales tax adjustment expense account.   Either way will work, zeroing out the sales tax payable account and the expense or income account you set up.  Shouldn't have to be so dificult!

marjanbastani
Level 3

Workaround/Hack for Sales Tax Prepayments

Oh my god, I have been having the same issue. This function to enter prepayment was working for many years, just recently I see the option is gone.  and the idea to use expense account is so so strange and random

So my workaround is to change that to monthly, but at the time of entering the final amount for the quarter, I change that to quarterly ( changing back and forth, unfortunately), so I can see all the debits and credits in one shot. This is so strange that we have to come up with all these extra work, just for a simple prepayment entry!

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