Sales Taxes

Question

We have to charge a different tax for "non-prepared food" that "standard Sales Tax" in the state of Utah, I don't know about other states. However, I think it would be helpful if we could assign our different tax rates that we setup to our items list. It gives us a way to select taxable and percentage but what about which rate? Maybe this needs to be an option for our Invoices/Sales Order/Sales Receipt, what ever you call them. I would be happy to explain more if you like.

Custom Invoice Items.JPG

Tax Rate Settings.JPG

UKR · Answer

OK. Piece of cake, then, since you already have the different Sales Tax accounts set up.

However, you need to create multiple Customer Invoices, one each per tax rate.

Now, if you want to be able to combine these multiple Sales Tax Rates into one Customer Invoice, all the programmers would have to do is to

* change the "Taxable" checkmark in the Line Item Description to a pointer to the appropriate Sales Tax account, (I'll call it T1, T2 … Tnnn for brevity)
* change the "T" column in the Customer Invoices line item to a pointer to the appropriate Sales Tax account T1, T2 … Tnnn 
* change the invoice program logic to keep track of the number of Sales Tax accounts and
* calculate individual sales tax subtotals by Sales Tax account T1, T2 … Tnnn
* change the Invoice footer to print as many Sales Tax amount lines (T1, T2 … Tnnn) as needed for this invoice, preferably without exceeding the space available on a page
* calculate a correct grand total (Subtotal + T1 + T2 +…) as Total invoice amount
* upon save of the invoice transfer subtotals as transactions to each of the Sales Tax accounts
* Make any other program logic changes as needed to handle subsequent changes of this invoice (adding line items, changing items and their tax type, deletion of this invoice and subtracting/removing Sales Tax transactions, etc.)
* … and I'm probably forgetting a few other need-to-also-change items here …

Easy, peasy. No?

Now all you need to do is to convince the programmers to do it …

JerryBSr · Answer

I do not think it would be that big of a deal. I already have the different tax Files. I just need it to be such that I can assign them to each line item. They already have it so you can turn off/On the tax for each item. Just make it a dropdown and we select the appropriate tax that applies to the item.

UKR · Answer

Quicken (US version), at this time, only supports one Sales Tax Rate, as set in the description of the *Sales Tax* account.

If I understand @JerryBSr correctly, they need a different tax (rate) for "non-prepared food" that "standard Sales Tax", for example,

* Tax Rate T1 for standard tax rate at x% and
* Tax Rate T2 for non-prepared food at y%

and because there appear to be additional local taxes involved, one might also need additional tax rates by location, city, county, state, etc.

Implementing that would be, IMHO, a major change to Customer Invoices processing, requiring a major redesign.

I wonder how (and if) other accounting software vendors support that.