Taxes

Synopsis:

• What are Tax codes and how do I configure them?
• What are Tax code considerations if I’m importing from an Ecommerce system or exporting to QuickBooks?
• How can I assign a default tax code to a customer or vendor?
• How can I mark a Customer, Vendor, or Product as taxable or tax-exempt?

 Webinar transcript

APT University: Taxes

Hello Everyone and welcome to APTU – Today we’ll be discussing Tax and how it works within
AdvancePro.

First let’s have a short high level discussion about Tax in AdvancePro – there are a few basic Questions we need to answer in order to know how much tax is going to be applied for an order:
We need to know if the customer or vendor is Taxable at all, and if so, which tax rates or tax terms apply to this transaction – a default tax rate can be set for each customer and vendor. Next it looks at your product settings and will exclude any non taxable items

So launching into the software, you’ll find your primary tax settings under the admin tab, under Tax. If you’re working with QuickBooks, we can import your existing tax Terms direct from QuickBooks, or you can create tax codes in AdvancePro and then match them up with QuickBooks. Something else to keep in mind is that if you are importing orders, then you need to import a tax Term to get taxes to appear correctly.

If you’re not syncing with QuickBooks or with a website, you can enter any taxes you need to here.

So here we have a tax term, a tax code a tax rate, a tax description, a tax type and a tax agency.

So the tax type just specifies if the tax is going to be available for customer sales orders or vendor purchase orders. The Tax type really applies if you’re using the Canadian QuickBooks, And the agency is used particularly in QuickBooks to specify which tax agency you pay when you collect these taxes, or which tax agency you apply for refunds from when you pay taxes out to a vendor.

The tax rate is the percentage that will be added to the order as tax, and the tax code is a short hand for your tax, so many people will use Sales Tax, or abbreviated to ST, or in Europe you’ll see VAT, in Canada you’ll see HST and so on. This is the abbreviation that will appear on your orders.

Now if you choose a particular Tax code you can apply it to all customers or vendors, this is a quick easy way to give universal tax rules.

Now you can also create a tax group, this is done back in Admin under the tax panel, you might use this to charge more than one tax, in the USA, you might need to charge tax at both the county and state level, for example, or in Canada you may need to charge QST or PST and GST in certain provinces. So this feature gives you that option.

So to manually assign a customer tax you’ll go to View All customers > edit a customer > Payment info and you’ll see there’s an option to enable tax and to choose from a list of customer tax rates.

To assign a vendor tax you’ll find it in the additional info tab.

Now this assigns a default rate, but you might carry some products that are tax exempt. So you can go to products and find the taxable checkbox under additional info.

So to know if a customer is going to pay tax on a given item, AdvancePro will look at the customer first, see that there’s tax, then total up the items that are marked as taxable and apply the tax accordingly.

To mark all items as taxable or non taxable, you can visit Admin> Site Settings > Site Wide Settings and click one of the corresponding buttons.

Under General settings you’ll also see an option to make shipping taxable as well.

If you’re using the UK or Canadian version of QuickBooks, you may also see an option to pay different rates at a line item level so that items can be partially tax exempt.

In most other versions of AdvancePro, your assigned customer or vendor tax will be the default, but you can always Change to particular tax rate for a given order from the tax dropdown here on the lower right.

So this concludes today’s Brief tour of Taxes in AdvancePro.

Q:   How can I apply taxes for my B2C web service dynamically by state?

So with our B2B, B2C, or SalesRep Web Portal,  we can do a single tax for all, or you can have the tax codes with taxes dynamically by state name, you do this just by making the tax term match the state name,  this works for the two letter state abbreviations or for the written state for non US states or provinces.   For other integrations with other web sales, you want to make sure that tax codes appear and match between your webservice like Woo Or shopify, and AdvancePro and QuickBooks to make sure the data is properly linked through the entire system.

Q: How can I get reports on taxes?

So in general we recommend getting reports on financials by syncing directly into QuickBooks. If you’re a current AdvancePro user who is not syncing with QuickBooks, please reach out to us and we’ll give you the best answer for your particular situation.