Sales Tax Setup
The Sales Tax Setup is two parts. The first part will be setting up your default taxability settings in your Settings area of Company. Under the Pricing/Finance header, you will decide if your new customers should default to Taxable or Nontaxable and select an optional default Tax Zone. You can choose to leave the default Tax Zone blank if a majority of your customers do not fall into the same Tax Rate.
The second part will be setting up your Tax Zones in the Tax Setup area of Company. If you had an active Tax Rate prior to this feature, you should see a 'Default' option in this section and can choose to keep, alter or archive that option. This option was to ensure that you would keep your current tax setup after this feature launched without making any changes. A best practice will be to create new Tax Zones in this screen that match your Tax setup in your Quickbooks account to ensure proper mapping, but the feature in Sera will be available even if the names do not match.
Note: you can also manage Tax Exemption Reasons in this section if you would like to add or remove any to the pre-populated list. This reasons will be requested when you mark a customer as Tax Exempt.
Customer Tax Setup
Customer's taxability status is housed on the Customer's addresses in their account. Individual address cards will contain the Taxability and can be edited at any time by clicking the Edit Taxes hyperlink. If the address is marked as Taxable, the Tax Zone will display. If the tax details are changed, a note will be saved in the customer's Notes section.
Task Level Setup
Tasks within Sera will be automatically defaulted to Taxable, but can be updated at any point. If your customer is marked as Nontaxable, the tax settings of the tasks will not be used. You can mark the task as Nontaxable for tasks that you would never need to charge your taxable customers a tax percentage on.
Memberships and Warranty programs can now be marked as Taxable as well. You can choose to mark the membership original sale or renewal as taxable separately according to your jurisdiction's requirements.
Quote Tax Override
For a Taxable customer, you will see the tax status of the task on the Quote marked with a checkbox. You can remove the taxability within that quote by unchecking the box. Should you need to change the Tax Zone on this specific quote you can update that by clicking the Tax box at the bottom of the quote. This will display the tax settings of the address but can be updated. A note referencing the change will be saved in the customer's account or under the job Notes tab (if applicable).
Tech App Override
Technicians within the Tech App will have the capability to make the updates to the tax settings on the customer but will not be able to adjust the line item taxability to ensure that the company decisions regarding which items are taxable and non remain in the hands of the management team and/or your accounting staff.
Sales Tax Report
A Sales Tax Report is now offered to display the Sales Tax collected on invoices by the Tax Zone. This report is available for export should you need to reconcile against your accounting platform or use the information to pay your jurisdiction. Tax collected prior to the feature will not contain a Tax Zone name but will be presented in the report for tracking.