HST on purchases (Q Win Canada)

RobertDNA

I have setup tax tracking on vendor invoices but when I enter an invoice from the vendor it does not ask me for the sales tax amount. When I look at the HST report it does not show any tax on purchases.

Frankx

Hi @RobertDNA  and @DonM52

Let me see if I can provide some help here.  I believe that your issue is as follows:

1) you can currently view and track the HST that you are charging your customers/ clients in Quicken; however,
2) you cannot currently view or track the HST that you are paying to vendors, AND you need this data in order to complete your Harmonized Sales Tax reporting requirements to the government.

 @DonM52 - you said " These are both Balance Sheet accounts and should not be recorded as Business Expenses."  While, I would agree with this statement in principle, Quicken is not necessarily setup to treat it that way.  But there is a workaround that you can use.  If you are currently using Quicken to track the HST you charge to customers, you should have an account Quicken entitled *Sales Tax*.  Currently, I suspect that this account only holds entries for the amounts of sales taxes you charged to your customers/clients.  In order to track your liability for HST you will also need to change the way you are recording your purchases and you will need to use this account.  For each purchase that you make where you pay HST - and for which you will be able to use that payment to reduce your tax liability to the government - you should record each purchase by breaking out the HST you paid and recording it to the *Sales Tax* category in Quicken.  Here is an example of how it would look in Quicken in a Bill - Vendor Invoice screen:


Hope this helps.  If you have any followups, get back to me.

Frankx

RobertDNA

How do you specify that a vendor either charges HST in their invoices or charges a different rate or no sales tax at all?

Quicken Jared

RobertDNA said:

I have setup tax tracking on vendor invoices but when I enter an invoice from the vendor it does not ask me for the sales tax amount. When I look at the HST report it does not show any tax on purchases.

Hello @RobertDNA, 

I am sorry to hear about this issue with taxes on purchases in reports. Thank you for getting in touch with the Quicken Community regarding this matter.

What information are you entering in the Details field when entering an invoice in the Add Bill Reminder window? Also, are any Optional Settings currently enabled in the field beneath that?

I hope to hear back from you regarding this.

Thanks,

Quicken Jared 

RobertDNA

I have no reason at this time to use bill reminder. I want to enter the vendor invoice with details and have the sales tax posted for to my records so it will show up when I do an HST report. Customer invoices that I send out show up in my HST report but not my purchases.

RobertDNA

If I enter a vendor invoice to me, it looks like I have to create a split in the category field and then create a field called HST but I do not understand what I should do after this. Most vendors give a receipt that I would like to enter simply as a manual entry and not have to create so much work each time.

If I make the type just a payment it doesn't seem to give me the choice to create the split, it seems to want.

Quicken Jared

RobertDNA said:

If I enter a vendor invoice to me, it looks like I have to create a split in the category field and then create a field called HST but I do not understand what I should do after this. Most vendors give a receipt that I would like to enter simply as a manual entry and not have to create so much work each time.

If I make the type just a payment it doesn't seem to give me the choice to create the split, it seems to want.

Hello @RobertDNA

Thank you for continuing to correspond with me about sales tax tracking.

To be clear, are you referring to Invoices created in a Business account within Quicken? If so, there should be an option to enter tax in the Invoice - Customer Invoices window after clicking the Create an Invoice button just below the Business and Rental tabs near the top right-hand side of the screen. I have posted a screenshot for reference.



I hope this is helpful.

Thank you,

Quicken Jared 

RobertDNA

Thank you for the response but, sorry, but you didn't read my question.

It is not invoices that I create, it is invoices or receipts that I receive from Vendors that I want to post into Quicken Home & Business.

I need to track the HST paid to Vendors for purchases that I make.

NotACPA

@RobertDNA, why not simply split the payment transaction and have one of the split lines be for the HST?

That how I record US Sales tax on items that I buy.

RobertDNA

Are you saying that I should go into the Vendor Invoices register and enter the vendor receipt there?

DonM52

I am having the same problem as RobertDNA. I am using Quicken Home & Business. NotACPA, I think you don't understand how the Canadian Sales Tax system works. It is a VAT (Value Added Tax) so you charge customers the sales tax on your Sales Revenues (i.e. creating a Sales Tax Payable) but you also credit the Sales Tax you pay on purchases from Vendors (i.e. creating a Sales Tax Paid account). These are both Balance Sheet accounts and should not be recorded as Business Expenses. For reporting purposes, in any given reporting period the two accounts are netted against each other and you pay the difference owing (usually ... sometimes if you make major purchases, they may owe you money).

The solution you are proposing won't work because the Sales Tax Paid shows up as a Business Expense.

Quicken seems to ignore this matter altogether. There is nothing in Help that addresses this issue.

DonM52

Quicken Jared doesn't seem to understand this issue either.

Chris_QPW

I don’t have the home and business version, and I certainly don’t use the Canadian version so this may be way off base.  Here is my impression of the Canadian version.  It was branched off of the US version and in most cases other than change terms they haven’t really done a full evaluation of the differences and programmed that in.  Just going o remarks from people posting here for how taxes are handled on securities and such being different and never properly supported, that this might fall into the same category.  From what I understand at one time with Intuit there were Canadian developers, but that is long gone.

So, in fact there might not be any kind of built-in support for HST, and if that is true you shouldn’t expect it any time soon.  You might go to the Home page and select New Post -> New Idea to submit a request for it.

In the mean time it seems from your description that you might be able to do a transfer in and out of an account for recording HST, and then a transaction report on that account would sum the difference.

Frankx

Hi @RobertDNA  and @DonM52

Let me see if I can provide some help here.  I believe that your issue is as follows:

1) you can currently view and track the HST that you are charging your customers/ clients in Quicken; however,
2) you cannot currently view or track the HST that you are paying to vendors, AND you need this data in order to complete your Harmonized Sales Tax reporting requirements to the government.

 @DonM52 - you said " These are both Balance Sheet accounts and should not be recorded as Business Expenses."  While, I would agree with this statement in principle, Quicken is not necessarily setup to treat it that way.  But there is a workaround that you can use.  If you are currently using Quicken to track the HST you charge to customers, you should have an account Quicken entitled *Sales Tax*.  Currently, I suspect that this account only holds entries for the amounts of sales taxes you charged to your customers/clients.  In order to track your liability for HST you will also need to change the way you are recording your purchases and you will need to use this account.  For each purchase that you make where you pay HST - and for which you will be able to use that payment to reduce your tax liability to the government - you should record each purchase by breaking out the HST you paid and recording it to the *Sales Tax* category in Quicken.  Here is an example of how it would look in Quicken in a Bill - Vendor Invoice screen:


Hope this helps.  If you have any followups, get back to me.

Frankx

DonM52

Replying to both Chris_QPW & Frankx: First of all, your understanding for both your points (1) & (2) is correct. I followed your suggestion, using the Quicken Sales Tax account (which I re-named 'HST Payable') in the Category field, instead of setting up a new Category called 'HST Paid', and once I saved the record Quicken posted the HST amount paid as a 'Decrease' in the HST Payable account, which is correct. In other words, instead of maintaining two separate accounts, one for HST Payable and another for HST Paid, Quicken nets them against each other in the same account. Thank you both for your help. I believe this addresses my problem.

To the other point raised by Chris_QPW, I do feel that Quicken Support for the Canadian version is very weak. It was clear to me, from the couple of times I tried to access Quicken Support, that the people I was speaking with had no real knowledge of the business version of the software and were not capable of explaining how to address problems I encountered, specifically dealing with Form design. One of the things that is also confusing is that Quicken Home & Business uses what looks like the same Invoice Form for recording both Sales Revenue and Bills - or Vendor Accounts Payable; however, if you choose to print the Vendor AP record, it prints out a form that looks exactly like one of your Invoices and even shows Invoice in the heading. It makes the software seem like a work-in-progress rather than a completed and tested product.