Understanding How To Pay Sales Tax In Lizzy
There are lots of things Lizzy can do for you to help run the business and one is paying your collected sales tax each month. In this entry we’re going to cover how to get the information you need to file the required taxes.
Go to Invoicing > Reports > Sales Tax Report. Select your date range and the type of report you are running (Invoiced / Collected) and, from the drop down, select the Universal Report Type. Lizzy supports the ability to create multiple report types from settings but generally the universal report will contain what you need.
By default, Lizzy will display the collected taxes on the screen and will include any and all taxes collected but not paid, from your end date you selected backwards to the beginning of time. This means if you paid last months taxes already but someone post dated an invoice back to a prior period, that invoice will also show on this months report. If you’d like to run a report that ONLY displays data between the selected dates then you can elect to run a snapshot report which will ignore whether something has been paid or not and just look at the date ranges.
Clicking on the items in the tax report will display additional information containing the individual invoices that make up each of the numbers being displayed. This helps you to investigate possible issues quickly if needed.
Clicking the button to pay the taxes will open an additional dialog that allows you to enter the exact amounts and taxes you wish to pay at that time. Its not until you go through this step that the taxes are actually tagged as paid and a check or EFT is created in your checking account.
Select all the taxes you wish to pay, and in the middle of the screen are 2 adjustment areas. You can either ADD Money or SUBTRACT money from your total. You will then need to select the GL account and enter the dollar amount if you need to do adjustments in order for Lizzy to know why they were made.
The next area below that is for you to prepay sales tax. IF you do this, you will need to go into Settings > General > Tax Rates first and set a tax as a prepaid tax. Then, when you are making payments (pre-paying) you will go to Checking and write checks hitting your prepaid tax account (142 range). When you run your sales tax report and you fill in your date range, Lizzy will go look in checking for anything in that date range that hit the prepaid account and will then pull the information and populate it in the sales tax payment screen for you.
Finally, at the bottom of this screen, you have 2 options. Lizzy can create a payable for you by going to Accounting > Payables > Pay Payables. This will leave you with a payable to pay for Sales Tax. OR, you can select the Write Check option. Here, Lizzy will create an EFT entry in your checkbook. You would then go onto the web and pay your sales tax electronically.
As you can see, Lizzy makes keeping track of your sales tax a fairly easy process once you understand what is going on.