Quicken 2005 - Invoice reports

Posted by Hawk on October 1, 2007, 7:18 pm

Please log in for more thread options

Hello,

I'm running Quicken 2005 Premier Home & Business - and have used Quicken
for our small business ever since we started - just about 10 years ago.

I'm sort of discouraged, though when every quarter - when it's time to
submit my sales tax to the state (Texas), I have to manually add-up my
total sales (invoice sub totals), taxable sales (invoices that I charged
sales tax on), and sales tax collected..

I've looked all through the quicken reports - and I just can't find an
easy way to extract what I'm looking for... is there one? Or am I
going to need to simply find a better accounting method?

Thanks,
R Smith

Posted by Wayne on October 2, 2007, 12:58 pm

Please log in for more thread options

shadowhawk@treasureboards.com says...

>Hello,

>I'm running Quicken 2005 Premier Home & Business - and have used Quicken

>for our small business ever since we started - just about 10 years ago.

>I'm sort of discouraged, though when every quarter - when it's time to

>submit my sales tax to the state (Texas), I have to manually add-up my

>total sales (invoice sub totals), taxable sales (invoices that I charged

>sales tax on), and sales tax collected..

>I've looked all through the quicken reports - and I just can't find an

>easy way to extract what I'm looking for... is there one? Or am I

>going to need to simply find a better accounting method?

Tell me about it. :) No, Quicken does not help much.

I am in a DFW area subject to DART MTA tax, so I also have to track city,
regarding the 1% DART tzx. My sales tax is only a couple hundred dollars
annually, so I only report the tax to the state once at year end.

Most of my online sales are not in Texas, Quicken reports can count the
total overall sales number. My Texas sales tax entry (from a Texas
invoice) goes to the *Sales Tax* account. Which never seems to appear in
any Quicken report (cannot find a Category to include for it), but from
within that account, it can total it in the Register Report menu (for the
year).

But cities are a problem for me. The way I read the rules, because my
city is DART MTA, I collect the MTA 1% from all DART MTA cities, but not
from other cities. So what I do is for sales in Texas, I edit each one
of those sales tax records as they occur, to add city to the Memo field in
the *Sales Tax* account. This city then shows in the register report
too, but you have to figure out what is what for subtotals. However this
much alone should have a big impact, but is still tedious work.

What I actually do is at year end, I export that *Sales Tax* account (for
the year) to a qif file. Then I wrote a smell program to read it sort it
and count it by city. That little program knows which cities are 8.25%
with DART MTA, and the others are 7.25%.

Posted by Hawk on October 8, 2007, 10:23 pm

Please log in for more thread options

Thanks Wayne & John,

Both your posts give some hope... But alas - I think it's quicker in the
long-run to just wait til the end of each quarter, and add up the
sales... We generally have about 200-250 invoices per quarter... and
about 90% are non-taxable (resale, church, and out-of-state sales... so
picking out the taxable ones, though, is a PITA.

For a while we ran a separate spreadsheet. Whenever we created a
quicken invoice, we'd enter the data including onlt the following info:
Invoice number, Invoice Date, Invoice subtotal, and tax collected.

Then I'd sort based on tax collected, and give a total sum of the
subtotal column, and then a sum of the invoices that had a "tax
collected" in excess of 1 cent.

I may go back to this method... We gave it up when I realized 2 years
ago that quicken would do invoices.. however, I think it's lacking in
some of the "basic" reports that a small business needs... Maybe in a
future version....

(Yep - we're in Dallas county as well - but even the Texas long form for
sales tax submissions is pretty easy.. then we file & pay via their
web-file.

Rex S.

Wayne wrote:

> shadowhawk@treasureboards.com says...

>> Hello,

>> I'm running Quicken 2005 Premier Home & Business - and have used Quicken

>> for our small business ever since we started - just about 10 years ago.

>> I'm sort of discouraged, though when every quarter - when it's time to

>> submit my sales tax to the state (Texas), I have to manually add-up my

>> total sales (invoice sub totals), taxable sales (invoices that I charged

>> sales tax on), and sales tax collected..

>> I've looked all through the quicken reports - and I just can't find an

>> easy way to extract what I'm looking for... is there one? Or am I

>> going to need to simply find a better accounting method?

> Tell me about it. :) No, Quicken does not help much.

> I am in a DFW area subject to DART MTA tax, so I also have to track city,

> regarding the 1% DART tzx. My sales tax is only a couple hundred dollars

> annually, so I only report the tax to the state once at year end.

> Most of my online sales are not in Texas, Quicken reports can count the

> total overall sales number. My Texas sales tax entry (from a Texas

> invoice) goes to the *Sales Tax* account. Which never seems to appear in

> any Quicken report (cannot find a Category to include for it), but from

> within that account, it can total it in the Register Report menu (for the

> year).

> But cities are a problem for me. The way I read the rules, because my

> city is DART MTA, I collect the MTA 1% from all DART MTA cities, but not

> from other cities. So what I do is for sales in Texas, I edit each one

> of those sales tax records as they occur, to add city to the Memo field in

> the *Sales Tax* account. This city then shows in the register report

> too, but you have to figure out what is what for subtotals. However this

> much alone should have a big impact, but is still tedious work.

> What I actually do is at year end, I export that *Sales Tax* account (for

> the year) to a qif file. Then I wrote a smell program to read it sort it

> and count it by city. That little program knows which cities are 8.25%

> with DART MTA, and the others are 7.25%.

Posted by Wayne on October 9, 2007, 10:27 pm

Please log in for more thread options

It seems easier Rex, at least almost. I use Q2005 too, and the sales tax on
the invoice goes to your sales tax account (defined at Q2005 menu Options -
Invoice Defaults in your invoice account). I use one invoice for Texas, and
another for non-Texas or non-taxable, so there is only a tax field on taxable
Texas sales. That sales tax account shows only the tax amount, customer
name and date (for each Texas invoice that had the tax field on it), but its
register report will add it up for a date range, like for the quarter or
year.

Then if local sales, where your tax rate is 8.25% and total amount of tax
collected has added to $X by the register report, then $X is obviously what
you report, and your taxable sales was X / 0.0825 dollars. This is quite
automatic, plus a minute to do the register report and reach for the
calculator to divide.

But my problem with mail order delivery is that some of mine are 8.25%, but
others in Texas but outside of DART MTA area are 7.25%, which is two totals
because of the different divisors. The tax form wants an overall total for
the state (6.25%), same overall total for your city of Dallas (1%), and a
smaller total (just from the DART cities) to credit to DART MTA (1%). So I
identify these by manually putting the city name in the Memo comments area of
that tax account record (as entered, to ID them). Technically, you only need
cites on the DART city invoices, but I add it to all to flag when I forget to
add it.

I dont see a way for Quicken to sort those cities, but if you print it and
mark DART cites with a highlighter pen, it is easy to add them. You do have
to learn the DART cites, and keep it straight, which is pretty simple. And
you do have the overall total. But I instead actually export this tax
account to QIF file, and wrote a small program to sort it by city and add up
totals, and the DART cities.

Posted by John B in CA on October 9, 2007, 10:57 pm

Please log in for more thread options

Hi again guys...

I just checked the Intuit Support site and searched under Quicken 2008 for
"sales tax." There are several articles which address the exact questions
Rex is asking about.

quicken.custhelp.com

John B.