Missing Local Colorado Sales Tax Jurisdiction

I can help get your sales tax rates sorted out, R_Crane.

If your business is not located in any of the cities below, that's the reason why the "Colorado, Jefferson County" tax rate of 0.50% isn't showing up on your sales forms.  

• Arvada
• Westminster
• Wheat Ridge
• Golden
• Buffalo Creek
• Conifer
• Littleton
• Evergreen
• Idledale
• Kittredge
• Pine
• Lakewood

You may wish to reach out with your state agency to check if you are oblige to pay Jefferson County tax. 

If you have any questions, please let us know. We'er to help. 

Welcome to 2020,  

This issue still has not been resolved.  Figure that over the last 2 years someone might address this  but nope.

I just found out that QBO invoicing hasn't been charging sales tax for any of my Denver clients this year!!!! Invoicing through quickbooks online has been an incredibly bad experience all year but this is over the top. The product very clearly communicates to you that tax is being automatically calculated. Then, come to find out it's only charging State and RTD?!! Even the rep I spoke with said that this is terrible! I'm told I have to add it manually every time. I am going to be out thousands of dollars that I don't have because of this constantly inept global corporation. What is happening?!!

I have actually reported this problem more than once over the past year to QuickBooks, but no response, and no progress has been made.  The entire sales tax liability report for Colorado Department of Revenue has all the wrong jurisdictions, wrong totals, wrong invoices, and wrong categories in it.  The Colorado Department of Revenue does not collect individual taxes like Regional Transportation District, Southeast Jefferson County Lid District, or Scientific And Cultural Facilities District.  But they are listed as separate categories with their own totals on the report.  There is no way to pay these individual taxes on the Colorado Department of Revenue’s website.

The state of Colorado collects taxes by local sales tax jurisdiction, and it adds all the taxes together that apply to that jurisdiction: state, county, city(if applicable), RTD (if applicable), LID district (if applicable), Scientific and Cultural Facilities (if applicable) districts, etc.  For each individual address the state and county tax always applies (but some counties don’t have a sales tax), but the city and various other districts might or might not overlap with that address. 

The key is that the jurisdiction code is based on the address of the sale and the sales total and untaxable sales total for the sales in that jurisdiction are how the Colorado Department of Revenue calculates the sales taxes for that jurisdiction. Cities and counties that collect their own sales taxes also collect the special district sales taxes for the addresses within their boundaries (RTD, Scientific and Cultural Facilities), LID districts, etc.  You will find a much longer list of jurisdictions in Colorado Department of Revenue Sales tax returns that don’t even remotely overlap with / coincide with the list of districts in the QuickBooks Colorado Department of Revenue Sales Tax liability report.  It is very complicated because the districts, cities, and counties must look like a very complicated Venn Diagram with some districts overlapping each other and some districts overlapping parts of counties and parts of cities.

Individual sales tax jurisdiction codes and sales tax rates can be looked up here:

https://tax.colorado.gov/GIS-info

Or you can look up juristictions and sales tax rates in bulk here:

https://salestaxlookup.colorado.gov/bulk-address-lookup

The sales tax liability Colorado Department of Revenue report also lists Denver city and county as a non-home rule city that the state collects sales taxes for.  This is false.  The city of Denver collects it’s own sales taxes quarterly through their own website.  I believe the developers / accountants that created the report didn’t understand the colorado jurisdictions at all, so the invoices categorized under each county are also inaccurate.  Some of them are in home rule cities.  Some of them are in unincorporated county addresses.  Also, the same invoices are listed in the Colorado Department of Revenue report and duplcated in their own report for the city they reside in, duplicating data and causing you to overpay sales taxes if you blindly trust the report. I don't trust any of the numbers in this report because most/all of the categories and “jurisdictions” are wrong in it. 

I ultimately had to come up with and manually compile my own report, looking up each address in my list of invoices on the Colorado department of revenue GIS sales tax jurisdiction lookup tool. 

I started with the QuickBooks report: “invoices by date”, adding columns in for “ship to”, taxable amount, and amount.  This is the complete list of all invoices in home rule cities that collect their own sales taxes and the cities and counties that let the Colorado Department of Revenue collect their sales taxes. Then I looked up all of the jurisdiction codes for each address on Colorado’s GIS sales tax lookup website.  Then, I excluded all of the Jurisdictions in the list of Home Rule Cities from the Department of Revenue list below, because the state of Colorado does not collect their sales taxes.  Each home rule city / county collects their own sales taxes directly:
 

https://tax.colorado.gov/DR1002

Then I compiled a report with all of the total sales and total non-taxable sales in each tax jurisdiction, with one row for each invoice that is in a non-home rule city / county (jurisdiction).  This provides the accurate list of taxable and non-taxable sales totals for all of jurisdictions that the Colorado Department of Revenue collects sales taxes on behalf of.

This was so tedious the first time (taking 3-4 hours for 200 invoices), that this time, I used Anthropic’s Claude AI to process, lookup and compile the report.  It also created a reusable “skill” for reuse quarterly (Claude wrote software scripts that it could run with the same inputs and outputs with reliable results). Creating the report / scripts took about an hour. Claude generates an Excel spreadsheet report with the only three values I need to file my sales taxes for each jurisdiction: Jurisdiction code, Total sales, and Non-Taxable sales.

My compiled report created by Claude AI:

The Quickbooks Sales Tax Liability Report with it’s incorrect categories / tax districts for Colorado Department of Revenue Agency 

Here is a sample subset of the list of jurisdictions in Jefferson County that you can add to your Colorado Department of Revenue sales tax account on their website.  Many of the 200 or so listed jurisdictions on the Colorado Department of Revenue are home rule jurisdictions that you can’t pay through the state of Colorado, because the city/ county collects the sales taxes directly.  So you have to only add the jurisdictions you have sales in that are not home-rule cities to the list of jurisdictions you file sales taxes for in your Department of Revenue sales tax account.