Sales tax: rates, exemptions and the liability report
How PortaPro sets the tax rate from each service address, how tax-exempt customers work, and how Financials → Sales Tax breaks out what you collected by jurisdiction for your filing period.
2:45 · Financials · Getting paid
Transcript
Every month or every quarter, the state asks how much sales tax you collected, and where. Here's how PortaPro keeps that answer ready. It starts in Settings, Finance, Tax and Compliance. Charge sales tax by default puts tax on every new quote and invoice. Your office can still switch it off on a single document. There's no rate table to keep up. PortaPro looks up the rate from each service address, down to the street when the address is complete, and stores the city, county and state it used on the invoice. The legal name, EIN and business address here are what print on the Schedule C export. Some customers don't pay tax at all: towns, schools, nonprofits. Mark them Tax exempt on the customer's edit screen, with the certificate number and its expiration date, and their invoices skip tax even with this switch on. What you collected lives in Financials, Sales Tax. Pick the filing period. It opens on last month, with quarters, year to date and last year one click away, or any custom range. Then the basis. Cash basis counts tax on invoices that are fully paid, dated by their final payment. Accrual basis counts every issued invoice by its invoice date, paid or not. The line underneath always says which one you're reading. Your preparer will know which one your state wants. Tax collected is the money to set aside. For September, a little over eleven thousand two hundred dollars. Beside it, taxable and non-taxable sales, then gross sales with the number of invoices behind it. Below that, the summary by jurisdiction. Every city and county you worked in gets its own row: gross sales, non-taxable, taxable, the tax, and how many invoices. The last row, No jurisdiction recorded, holds invoices that aren't tied to a city, county or state. For September that's ten invoices and forty-one dollars and fifty-two cents of tax. The note under the table says why, reason by reason: tax recorded without a place, an address the rate lookup couldn't find, or an exempt customer with no location. Sort those out before you file. On cash basis, a partly paid invoice waits. All of its tax lands in the month it finishes paying, so a period you've already filed doesn't shift later. Download it as a spreadsheet or a PDF to file from, or to send your bookkeeper. Automate this report takes you to Reports. There, the Sales Tax Liability template emails the same report on your filing schedule, monthly, quarterly or yearly, around eight in the morning, with the PDF and spreadsheet attached. PortaPro prepares the numbers. Filing the return is still yours or your preparer's, so give them a read before you submit.
More in Getting paid
- Catching billing mistakes with Billing HealthEvery night PortaPro checks rate cards, cycle invoices and credits for anything that would bill wrong, and tells your office what to fix.0:59
- Collecting a paymentRecord a check or cash, charge a card, or text the customer a pay link, all from the invoice. Credit on file and the cash price are applied for you.0:59
- Connecting QuickBooks, Xero or FreshBooksSend customers, invoices, payments and credits to QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop, Xero or FreshBooks, one way and automatically.0:53
- Reviewing and sending cycle invoicesEvery billing cycle, PortaPro drafts each rate-card customer's invoice. Check them over, hold back any that need a fix, and send the rest in one go.0:59