Sales tax management in New York State

Hi aarc :)

I am a one-time NY CPA and farm hand (not at the same time). My largest clients are still in NY, though I am now a Florida CPA and former elected official.

I am sure QuickBooks Enterprise will do your sales tax very well. Actually, Pro and Premier might also do it, but not because QuickBooks programmers are inherently psychic. All QuickBooks versions are mass-market products, but they all do a good job at setting up multiple sales tax rates for multiple jurisdictions. They also let you set up customers and products as exempt or taxable. You can even buy products in one unit of measure and sell it in others, individually or as a group (kit) or manufactured product.

I believe there are now around 10,000 sales tax jurisdictions, however, with many changing rates. NY naturally has its fair share of them. Add the taxable / nontaxable issue and you probably need (or soon will need) a custom sales tax program. The alternative would be lots of near psychic programmers and billing clerks. Of course, if they were psychic, you might never know how often they were wrong until the mean NY sales tax collectors tried to take your business, your wife and your cat (at least they were that mean when I was there). Fortunately, there is a much better way.

QuickBooks (especially QuickBooks Enterprise) can behave far better than many of the most powerful big company programs, in almost any area. It does this with thousands of QuickBooks add-ons. They are the fastest and easiest low-cost way of giving QuickBooks the specific extra features you need. Around 600 of the best of these have been Intuit, QuickBooks ProAdvisor and user tested, reviewed and rated. See http://marketplace.intuit.com/, as they can do terrific things for you in many areas. For example, one inexpensive integrated program will tell you how to route many deliveries, using many trucks, which may be the most profitable use of computer power. A second integrated program can let each driver have a GPS phone or PDA, to which you can send additional or revised deliveries, based on a real-time map of where they are currently (minimizing misuse, while providing better service). This phone/PDA also can let driver / service techs detail bill, with automatic downloads to QuickBooks.

The much better way to handle complex sales tax issues involves the Avalara QuickBooks add-on. Anyone who knows about it should give it a top rating, as you can quickly see at the above Intuit site. Their Avalara website has an easily customized cost calculator, as I doubt you will only want the $115 a year service (mentioned on the Intuit site). I could say that if this cost calculator adds up to too much, then my Google search on QuickBooks + “sales tax rate calculator” gave 47,600 links. However, if I exclude Avalara from the search (-avatax -avalara -ava) then there are only seven entries left. This includes one for first time homeowner loans in Missouri and one for science fiction and fantasy! I kid you not!

These searches seem to say more about Avalara than I could in any other way. Please let me know if you want QuickBooks Enterprise at a bigger discount or more information, about this or other QuickBooks add-ons, as many of the add-on vendors that are on (or should be on) my QuickBooks-add-ons[dot]com site  are not on the Intuit site.

A few of  these other QuickBooks add-ons would be the fastest and easiest low-cost way to let hundreds of users at once quickly and easily batch work, for up to 30 QuickBooks users, for companies with up to several thousand employees. You can have industry-standard big-company reports or automatic printing or emailing of any combination of QuickBooks reports (or Excel exports), on any schedule. You also can attach support documents to QuickBooks list items or transactions, to increase employee effectiveness and internal control and minimize audit time and cost. QuickBooks Enterprise is especially good for fine grained internal controls. Remote expense and time tracking, e-billing and payments, big company EDI, scale measurement, shipping calculators and much more are readily available. This lets employees get work done faster, with fewer errors, as there are no separate databases with duplicate inconsistent data and no posting errors or delays.

Few expensive big-company programs can do what QuickBooks Pro, QuickBooks Premier or QuickBooks Enterprise can do, because none have this wealth of QuickBooks add-ons. Intuit also is now adding a "cloud" (Software as a Service) option. It is a bit limited now, but it will soon let any web developer integrate any web program and database with the QuickBooks data of five million companies, having 25 million employees. This will create an international network of immense value, opening up exciting opportunities for all of us, especially if Intuit soon adds 25 million Quicken and TurboTax users.

By the way, I have a unique Intuit relationship. Former Intuit CEO Steve Bennett asked current CEO Brad Smith to contact me before reporting to work. Steve wrote that I should, "Keep raising hell when Intuit does something wrong." Brad told me he reads everything I write to Intuit and wrote, “You’re fantastic Mike. Absolutely fantastic!" What I did not expect was that Brad would call me for 35 minutes during the Florida - Alabama football championship game, or that my DVR would let me miss the end of it. So please consider subscribing to my QuickBooks-Blog and MikeBlockCPA Twitter account, for the fastest and easiest QuickBooks shortcuts and insider tips.

By the way again, can I use an impersonal version of this in my QuickBooks-blog? 

Hello Mike,

Thanks for the in-depth answer.  I'm not sure if I'm responding in the correct way for  this forum to follow up, so apologies in advance.

You certainly can use any of this on your blog (where exactly is it on the site?).

We are just beginning the evaluation process,  and will be coming off of old, proprietary warehouse management software. 

The sales tax issue is convoluted in NYS.  We have to sell taxable and non-taxable items to three classes of customers: tax on all, tax on some (determined by whether a resale number is on file), and exempt, no tax on anything.  This makes a simple yes/no for sales tax on any part or  item not an option, and for that matter not on the resale class of customers as well.

Presently, our software has an ATAX (AlwaysTAX) field in the _item_ record, which, if Yes,  will always tax the subject item _unless_ the customer being billed has the NTAX (NeverTAX) field  in their customer record set to Yes, meaning that they are exempt from all tax.  This solves all concerns, and in the event that you need to, you can toggle the sales tax on or off on  the line at invoice creation.

I will take a long look at the add-ons at the url you provided as this would make it possible to "customize" QB, in effect.

Regards,

Mario

AARC

Hi Mario

You responded in exactly the right way. Based on what you said, here are more things for you.

QuickBooks has 9, 20 or 99 price levels (it is easy to look up, but I have to leave soon ) for customers, so that is much more than your three customer classes. You can assign any customer to any price level, while charging any item at any non-standard amount on the invoice. If you do not have too many items, you could create custom item lists for different customers, with different sales tax preferences in each. You could use the group (kit) approach to sell the same item at different prices and descriptions, with only one accounting of quantities. Couple this with your  choice of non-taxable or taxable, at any rate, on any customer or on any item or group on the invoice, with optional subtotals anywhere you wish and it sounds like QuickBooks Enterprise alone is better than what you have. Add the Avalara QuickBooks customizing add-on and you will be way ahead. By the way, Avalara also is available for many packages, so they can do a job no one can do on a custom basis.

You also can track customers by type and track their sales and expenses by division (class) or unallocated. This means a P&L with different columns for class 1, 2, 3, unallocated and total. You can change all this quickly and easily.

I am not sure what warehouse management means in your case. However, if your want a really outstanding multi-location and multi-user billing and inventory control, for up to around 100 users,  then look at FishBowl (Google Fishbowl + QuickBooks) or check the Intuit Marketplace site.

My blog is at http://1234567890.typepad[.]com/quickbooks/ (remove [ ] )