• Improper or inadequate item descriptions Occasionally an auditor will flag vendor invoices that have descriptions which do not clearly define whether they are taxable or not. For instance, if installed carpet is a non-taxable item but your carpet installer’s invoice simply says 12 yards of carpet, it may appear that the vendor supplied you with carpet material only and should have charged you tax. The auditor could flag this invoice for use tax. You would then need to provide  documentation that the purchase was truly a non-taxable purchase. This is usually accomplished by requesting a revised invoice from the vendor which adds the words ‘installed’ to the description. Most times vendors are cooperative in these situations but there are times when it may be difficult to obtain that revised document.

• Tax amounts not clearly stated on invoices The auditor may also flag invoices that do not clearly state the amount of sales tax charged on the sale. Wording such as ‘sales tax included’ is not generally considered acceptable since it doesn’t state the actually amount or percentage of sales tax charged and collected. This is another instance where you may need to request a revised invoice from the supplier. If this type of issue might be found on some of your own billing documents, you may want to make those corrections prior to the audit to avoid having to deal with the corrections as part of the audit.

• Missing receipts In Part One of this series, we mentioned that the auditor will expect sales reports and purchase reports for the audit periods. The auditor will generally pull certain vendor files and sales invoices that he sees listed on the reports to check the detail on the invoices for accuracy. If the auditor is unable to find some of the invoices listed on the reports and you are not able to locate them as well, he may add these amounts to his list as well and require that you provide copies in order to eliminate them from the list of amounts used to assess your penalties.

A preventative measure that can be taken prior to an audit would be simply performing a self-audit in which you look for these types of issues yourself. If you have suppliers who are not charging tax on taxable items, request that they update their billings to meet current regulations. On invoices that you receive that haven’t been corrected, assess yourself the use tax and include it with the payment of your returns. If descriptions on invoices are vague or inaccurate, request that they be modified and resubmitted.

QuickBooks is an accounting application and FreshBooks is an invoicing application. They are two different things, but in the end to have your data matching in both, there could be a ton of double entry resulting in valuable time consumed and strenuous effort.

You can have your data accurate in both, while not matching in both. Matching and accuracy are two different things. For all of the numbers to match up, it is a matter of accuracy. To have all of the details such as sales items etc. it would be a matter of matching.

In this blog post, I will begin to show you ways to get accurate data from FreshBooks into QuickBooks.

This blog post is Part 3, if you have not read the previous posts, I suggest that you do:

Part 1: Methods 1 & 2 to getting FreshBooks Income into QuickBooks

Part 2: Method 3 to getting FreshBooks Income into QuickBooks

Also useful, is my post: Handling Credit Card and PayPal Processing Fees in QuickBooks, which has a short segment relating to FreshBooks as well.

On to the good stuff!

So, you have your income or receivables in QuickBooks, you may have even taken out your PayPal or Merchant Processing Fees. However, you don’t have your sales tax anywhere, as a matter of fact, it is showing as an Income and we all know your Sales Tax is NOT an income.

Well let’s correct that, shall we?

Just to recap… if you charge sales tax, your sales tax is included in the numbers that you entered from FreshBooks, so it is very important that you remove your sales tax from your revenue/income accounts and allocate it to your sales tax payable account.

1. Go into your FreshBooks Account

2. Click on the Reports Tab

3. Click on the Tax Summary Report in the first column

4. Select the month in Question that you want to enter.

5. In the Revenue section, you have to pick either Billed (Accrual) or Collected (Cash Based) – the choice you pick will be determined by the income entering method you have elected to use (based on previous posts). If you selected Methods 1 or 2 where you are accounting for your receivables you will select the Billed (Accrual) method. If you selected Method 3 where you are only accounting for your payments received you will select the Collected (Cash Based) method.

6. Once you have the amount/totals from your report (sorry I can’t give you a screen shot, I don’t have sales tax inside of my company) go into QuickBooks, select Company from the file menu and Make Journal Entries.

7. Enter the end date of the month you have pulled your sales tax details for.

8. In the first row from the account drop down box, pick your Income Account (mine is IAC Professionals Service Revenue), tab over to the debit column and enter the total of your sales tax from your sales tax report.

9. In the second row from the account drop down box, pick your Sales Tax Payable account (this should always be Sales Tax Payable) and in the credit column enter the total of your sales tax from your sales tax report. In this row you will also need to enter the name of your Taxing Agency in the Name Column. If it is not yet in your Vendor List, click Add New and create it. For example, mine would be State of Florida Sales Tax Department.

10. Press Save and Close

This has removed the actual sales tax portion of your revenue, out of your revenue and into your sales tax liability account, enabling you to use the ‘Pay Sales Tax’ feature inside of QuickBooks.

Do you have any questions or specific circumstances that I did not help you with? Feel free to comment on the post with your question(s) and I will respond personally!