Question

Is there a way to turn off the sales tax "based on location" feature? It is causing conflicts with our 3rd party accounting software.

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
September 11, 2020
9 replies
78 views

No text available

QuickBooks Online

Level 9

Thanks for coming in to Community, @tim107.

I'll share with you the information I have about sales tax calculation. Below are the lists of how QuickBooks calculates your taxes. Let's check this out.

Your customer’s tax exempt status
Where you sell and where you ship
What you sell

After checking the lists, you'll want to consult your 3rd-party provider and see if the "based on location" feature is available on their end. That way, they can help you out in turning off the feature.

However, if your 3rd-party program had a conflict on the customer's address (Where you sell and where you ship), turning off that option is unavailable. You can learn more about calculating sales tax at this link.

I'm also adding our page in case you need help with other taxes task. This will lead you to our general taxes topics with articles.

If you have any other concerns or questions, please don't hesitate to leave a comment below. I'm here to answer them for you. Have an awesome weekend ahead.

F

FLL

Hi QB team,

We are having the same issue here. We are rolling out to the year end and 3rd party warehouse system imports the invoices but sales tax is not populated in the invoice in QB.

Since our 3rd party warehouse system does not support the "based on location " sales tax but only pass through shopify data to QB, we have to do manual adjustment on each invoices.

This has casued a huge problem right now and we will not be able to close our book on time.

When your team update the system, should't you expect your customer would be in trouble?

If we can not turn off this feature, what is your suggestion?

MJoy_D

QuickBooks Team

Hello, @FLL.

I can provide some information about our sales tax in QuickBooks Online (QBO).

When using the Automated Sales Tax feature in QuickBooks Online (QBO), the calculation of sales tax amount is based on the state where you have nexus and are registered to collect sales tax, physical address of your business and on the sales forms, the product mapping you've associated with the item you're selling, and the exemption status of your customer.

I can see the importance of having a feature that'll let you deactivate this based on location sales tax. I'll be sure to take note of it. I'd also recommend you visiting our Blog to learn what new updates and features we have.

You may consider deactivating the State tax from the Sales Tax Center if you don't want this to calculate based on location.

Here's how:

Go to Taxes tab and select Sales Tax menu.
Proceed to the Sales tax settings.
Click the Edit drop-down of the tax agency and choose Make inactive.

Here's the use custom rates to manually calculate taxes on invoices or receipts article for more information on how to set up and use custom tax rates in QuickBooks Online.

Keep in touch if you need more help with your sales tax, or if there's anything else I can do for you. I always have your back and am always happy to help. Have a great day!

I

Iceabenezer

This has been a huge issue for us as well. We are a service-based company, and the sales taxes for services are different in our borough than for products. Quickbooks Online is now defaulting to Based On Location Sales taxes when importing sales, or when creating new customers (we have thousands of customers) and we have to change each and every invoice manually. It's currently a huge time sink, which is frustrating, because everything worked perfectly for years until QBO forced this update on us.

I called Customer Service and spent a huge amount of time with them, only for them to verify that there is no way to turn this new "feature" off. We can only turn off our "custom" sales tax rates as a prior commenter verified. Of course, our monthly fees to use QBO just went up (again), at the same time that the software is causing huge issues within our business, so that's a little unfortunate...

Please don't respond with a link to a tutorial on how to use sales tax within QBO. I've been versed in the software for years, and as mentioned above, I already verified with Customer Service that (much to their surprise) this new "feature" cannot be turned off.

D

Daisy John

I understand the direction they're trying to go and if it were completely functioning this could be a fantastic feature. I'm sure when this project is complete it will allow us to automate the transfer of data directly into our states collection forms. That end will be sweet.

Obviously this feature is at best ready for Beta testing. I have been dealing with this since March 2021 and can't believe it hasn't been fixed by now. First spending dozens of hours on the phone with QBO agents who blamed my 3rd party software. Then dozens more hours on with the 3rd party software engineers thinking it was their fault, then dozens more hours on the phone with QBO (where the real blame lands) begging to be heard that the feature needs to be fixed or pulled. Oh and BTW 100s more hours manually fixing individual invoices, ARGH!!!!

I pray they will address this, however after 8 months I'm looking for a creative solution. Has anyone looked into migrating to a desktop version until this blows over? I wonder if the feature doesn't exist or is able to be shut off in the desktop version?

G

Giovann_G

Moderator

Thanks for utilizing the Community space, Daisy John.

I can share information about the automated sales tax in QuickBooks Online(QBO).

The option to turn off the based on location feature is unavailable. Also, we're unable to see if anyone is migrating from QBO to QuickBooks Desktop. You'll need to enable this feature and set up tax items or tax groups when recording sales tax in QuickBooks Desktop.

If you want to migrate from QBO to QBDT, you can export and convert your QBO data to QuickBooks Desktop. I'll show you how.

Login to your QuickBooks Online account and click the Gear Icon.
Select the Export Data and enter your reason why you're exporting it. Then, click Continue.
Review your data from the export overview screen. Once ready, hit Export to Excel.
On the Exporting from QuickBooks Online page, choose Continue to Download.
Follow the rest of the on-screen instructions to complete the process.

You can now switch to QuickBooks Desktop after everything is finished. I've included this article to walk you through the process of importing your data: Export and convert your QuickBooks Online data to QuickBooks Desktop.

If you no longer need your QuickBooks Online account, check out this resource to learn how to cancel it: Cancel your QuickBooks Online subscription or trial.

Please let me know if you have any additional QuickBooks concerns. We're always here to back you up. Keep safe always.

M

MESAK26

This is so very frustrating. The type of industry we are in, we are allowed to take a 35% deduction on the taxable income so it changes our tax rate. The "Based on location" is too generic and does not take into many variations that might arise for a company. To have to go in and change each individual customer every time QBO syncs with our job scheduling software is extremely time consuming and frustrating when it should be a simple fix.

Why can we default a custom tax rate to appear for every single customer? Why can't we deactivate the base on location.

And the responses that are being given by QBO support is a nightmare. They are clearly not reading the frustration and concern but merely automating the responses. I have encourage my boss (the owner) to discontinue working with QBO and going with another company due to this.

A

Amy86

Same issue here. I have to go to every single invoice that has tax and change the tax field from Based on location to Tax in order for tax to calculate correctly. The subtotal before tax is always correct but the Based on location NEVER calculates for the amount of sales tax correctly. I am so unbelievably over this "feature". GET RID OF IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

H

Hats

Has this been resolved yet? I'm still spending hours manually changing and I'd really like a fix...

J

JamesAndrewM

Moderator

I understand what you're feeling right now, @Hats. As of the moment, there's no update yet about your concern.

The option to turn off the sales tax based on location is still unavailable. For usual reasons, the QuickBooks program calculates your sales tax automatically because;

The sales tax exemption status of your customer.
Where you sell and ship.
Sales tax classification for your service or product.

I appreciate your patience regarding this matter. Furthermore, you can utilize these articles to help manage your sales tax in QuickBooks Online:

For additional QuickBooks-related concerns, don't hesitate to post them here in the Community. We're always available and willing to lend a hand to your queries. Have a great day ahead.

D

Daisy John

James Andrew your response sounds like you may know there's going to be a fix for this in the future. What do you know about the solution?

S

savvior

Looks like I have joined the right party...LOL

I am making a script to sync 3P invoices to QB online. Everything was fantastic until I added a shipping address and all of my taxes got mangled.

It appears you can probably manipulate the customer object on the invoice when syncing it. I am going to try this today and will post back to see if this has an acceptable result

IN the PHP SDK I am looking at this

/**
 * @Definition 
                        Product: QBW
                        Description: US-only, reference to a TaxRate entity indicating the sales tax to apply by default for the customer.
                     
 * @xmlType element
 * @xmlNamespace http://schema.intuit.com/finance/v3
 * @xmlMinOccurs 0
 * @xmlName TaxRateRef
 * @var com\intuit\schema\finance\v3\IPPReferenceType
 */
public $TaxRateRef;

S

savvior

My replies aren't showing up on the thread.. in case anyone can see this

https://help.developer.intuit.com/s/question/0D54R00009g5rlISAQ/i-am-syncing-invoices-with-a-3p-invoicing-system-i-can-successfully-setup-a-custom-tax-rate-when-required-to-have-my-tax-line-accepted-by-qbowhen-specifying-a-shipping-address-it-is-ignored-workarounds

S

savvior

https://help.developer.intuit.com/s/question/0D54R00009g5rlISAQ/i-am-syncing-invoices-with-a-3p-invoicing-system-i-can-successfully-setup-a-custom-tax-rate-when-required-to-have-my-tax-line-accepted-by-qbowhen-specifying-a-shipping-address-it-is-ignored-workarounds

This is what i came up with

S

savvior

see my solution here.. reply there if you want

https://help.developer.intuit.com/s/question/0D54R00009g5rlISAQ/i-am-syncing-invoices-with-a-3p-invoicing-system-i-can-successfully-setup-a-custom-tax-rate-when-required-to-have-my-tax-line-accepted-by-qbowhen-specifying-a-shipping-address-it-is-ignored-workarounds

S

savvior

see my solution.. reply there https://help.developer.intuit.com/s/question/0D54R00009g5rlISAQ/i-am-syncing-invoices-with-a-3p-invoicing-system-i-can-successfully-setup-a-custom-tax-rate-when-required-to-have-my-tax-line-accepted-by-qbowhen-specifying-a-shipping-address-it-is-ignored-workarounds

F

fix-taxes-please

Has anyone found a solution to use the tax rate defined in the customer's 'Additional info' ? If not, what is that field for? I would love to be able to turn off anything to do with automated sales tax and just use that rate for each customer. Location based sales tax will not work for us. I'm currently seeing the best course of action being using the API to manually grab the rate defined in the customer's additional info, hand calculate the tax line, and push it along to each invoice. This seems a bit silly though because the desktop version did all of this for us.

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