The Practice Management & Marketing Tool Kit

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In This Issue

Practice Management & Marketing Tool Kit Available
Sleeter Group's West Coast "Double Header"
Adjust Sales Tax by Item
Consultant of the Month: Anna Sheets
Want to Get Published?
Consultant's Corner: Dealing with Unprofitable, Strained QuickBooks Consulting Relationships
Sleeter Group's College Textbook for 2002 Now Available
Free Shipping Available for Consultant's Reference Guide Version 2002

Adjusting Sales Tax by Item

By Doug Sleeter

Sales tax tracking is automatic and runs smoothly if you setup and operate QuickBooks correctly. However, if your QuickBooks file was not set up correctly, or if the Sales Tax feature has not been properly used in transactions, you will probably have a significant amount of troubleshooting to do in order to diagnose and repair the problems.

There are several ways to adjust the sales tax payable account in QuickBooks. You can use a Journal Entry, or you can create a transaction directly in the Sales Tax Payable account register, or in QuickBooks 2002 and above, there is a new feature called Adjust Sales Tax. However, all three of these methods for adjusting sales tax produce essentially the same result a journal entry that adjusts sales tax payable and offsets the adjustment to another account. If the purpose of your adjustment is to record government-allowed discounts, interest, penalties or rounding, any of these methods works just fine. You can think of all these adjustments as “sales tax return adjustments” because they all are something that you calculate and record somewhere on the sales tax return.

However, for all other types of adjustments to sales tax (e.g., adjustments that bring the balance of each sales tax item up to some known amount), you'll need to adjust Sales Tax Payable in a way that causes both the Sales Tax Payable account and the Sales Tax Items to reflect the change.

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Consultant's Corner by Joe Woodard Dealing with Unprofitable QuickBooks Consulting Relationships Many of your clients probably maintain their financial information in QuickBooks with little or no assistance from you throughout the year. Then, they engage with you at year-end to produce the Company's tax return and, if necessary, a compiled financial statement.  Unfortunately most small businesses do not have a fully qualified bookkeeper on staff and, unsupported by a QuickBooks consultant, are usually without accurate financial records.  After twelve months of compounded erroneous data entry, the accountant usually finds that the QuickBooks file is of little or no value in either managing the financial position of the company or for preparing the tax return.  Your relationship to this type of client is typically strained and unprofitable.  Not only do you provide only one service for these clients each year (the tax return), clients are typically in this situation because they are unable or unwilling to pay for the accounting and QuickBooks training and support they need. The thrifty nature of these clients typically extends to the tax return, forcing you to work with a hopelessly distorted QuickBooks file under tight budget constraints.  <Read more>

Anna Sheets
Metzger, Mancini & Lackner, CPAs
115 S. Eddy
South Bend, IN 46617
phone: (574) 232-9973
fax: (574) 232-8863
email: anna@mmlcpa.net
website: www.mmlcpa.net

Anna enjoys working directly with clients to accomplish their reporting and management goals. With a wide variety of business experience, she has helped hundreds of businesses to successfully meet their accounting needs.

Specializing in QuickBooks and Peachtree software support. Assisting clients in implementing and troubleshooting their software systems. Preparation of financial statements, individual and business tax returns (Federal and States).

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To find a Sleeter Group Certified Consultant in your area, visit www.sleeter.com and click "Find a Certified QuickBooks Consultant" on our home page.

The Sleeter Group newsletter editors are seeking content from QuickBooks professionals who would like to be published on The Sleeter Group Web site and in The Sleeter Group Newsletter. Do you have some great tips, tricks, workarounds that QuickBooks end users, or QuickBooks consultants would be interested in? If you do, submit an article for our review. If we feel it meets the criteria we are looking for, we will publish it. This is a fantastic way to demonstrate your expertise and meet new clients. So if you are interested, please let us know. You do not need to be a Sleeter Group Consultant to submit your article. Please send us the following information to webmaster@sleeter.com:

Your name
Your email
Your phone number
A brief description of what the article discusses
The actual text of the article itself

We will review your submission and contact you regarding publishing.