Accting for sales tax receipts in Q05

Perhaps Quicken is not appropriate for your use since it primarily reports income and expenses. It is lacking the balance sheet accounts you need to show a complete picture of your business.

A sales tax payable account should be a Liability account but I am not sure how you set this up using Quicken. You can set up liability & asset accounts in Quicken but you can not post deposits for sales and post the sales tax collected to that account.

You might look into upgrading to the Home & Business version of quicken or switching to quickbooks.

"Laura" wrote in news:mwsOh.203779$ snipped-for-privacy@bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att.net:

Yes, I wsa thinking about that possibility. I've found in the past that it is possible to make quicken look like a proper double-entry system, although some things like journaling aren't really there. I will have to go back to some reading on AP/AR and see how to implement it. I think with the proper use of accounts, transfers, and transactions it can work, though probably the best answer would be accrual accounting in QB, but that's just too much work for minimal benefit.

scott s. .

Being on a cash basis doesn't mean you don't establish assets and liabilities when appropriate, it only means you don't make accounting entries until cash flows.

Insofar as your sales tax liability goes, set up a sales tax liability account and post credits (i.e., increase your sales tax liability) when you make your cash sales deposit entries. So, assuming today's sales deposit is $108 ($100 in sales and $8 collected for sales tax) you'd make a split entry deposit in your bank account, depositing $108 in the account, crediting Sales for $100 and crediting Sales Tax Liability for $8. This would keep the sales tax from affecting your bottom line.

If, for some reason, you want P&L visabilty to the sales tax but don't want it affecting your bottom line, you could establish a seperate "revenue" account for sales tax and a seperate "expense" account for sales tax. Going back to our $108 example above, you'd split the deposit between Sales for $100 and the sales tax revenue account for $8. Then, you'd step over to your Sales Tax Liabilty account and increase it by $8 with the offset being the sales tax expense acccount. Net result: no bottom line affect. Plus, the amount in the sales tax revenue/expense accounts (they should equal) at the end of a quarter should be exactly the amount you send to the state subsequently.

Tom Young

Thanks Tom. I took a couple of trys before it sunk in, but now I have the behaviour I want and my Income and Cash Flow statements reflect what I believe to be correct data now.

scott s. .