How QuickBooks Shows Sales Tax on Invoices
In my prior article on sales tax in QuickBooks I showed you how to set up QuickBooks to properly manage sales tax. Now lets see how QuickBooks displays the sales tax in an invoice. When you add sales tax to an invoice we need it to show somewhere on the printed form so that the customer can see all charges that go into the total.
Here is the standard Intuit Product Invoice. It does not include the sales tax in the footer of the order. If you have a form like this, QuickBooks knows that it must add the charge somewhere, so it adds the sales tax as a detail line.
We can use the Additional Customization feature to add sales tax in the footer of the form – I recommend also adding a subtotal.
If you make this change, the sales tax now shows in the footer, not as a detail line.
Not Showing Sales Tax Percentage
Several people have asked about not showing the sales tax percentage in the form. If you look at both of the samples above, the percentage always shows. Here is how to handle this in QuickBooks.
Set up a form that includes the sales tax in the footer, as shown above.
Select the Layout Designer and click on the label for the sales tax (not the sales tax field itself).
Delete this label by pressing the delete key.
At the top, click the add button and add a text box.
Right click on the text box and select properties and set the font type and font size (usually Arial and 12 pt) and enter the text “Sales Tax”. Drag the label to the footer.
If you add the label this way the sales tax percentage will not show.
I hope that this is clear – if you have any more questions please ask!
Category: Invoicing
About the Author (Author Profile)
Charlie Russell is the founder of CCRSoftware. He’s been involved with the small business software industry since the mid 70′s, focusing on inventory and accounting software for small businesses. Charlie is a Certified Advanced QuickBooks ProAdvisor. Look for Charlie’s articles in the QuickBooks and Beyond blog, as well as his California Wildflower Hikes blog.
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i added in the sales tax as you recommended however it did NOT remove the line from the body of the invoice (a detail line)…any suggestions?
Kate: Are you seeing the sales tax in the footer of the invoice? If you don’t see it in the footer, then you haven’t set up the template correctly. If it doesn’t show in the footer, it will show as a line in the detail section.
Also – Kate – is this a situation where you have a zero-rate sales tax item, so there is a $0 sales tax? If so, on screen look for the “Customer Tax Code” box near the bottom and set it to “non”…
yes there is sales tax in the footer, adn no it is not a zero-rated sales tax item. any other ideas?
Kate, sorry, I’d have to see the document (can you email me a PDF) possibly, or maybe even look at your company file. It isn’t something that I can figure out remotely like this. I’m sure it is something simple.
Have you tried using one of the standard invoice templates to see if that works differently?
if you email me you address, i will forward you a pdf of my invoice.
Kate, my contact information is available in the “About” page, link at the top of this page. Note that I might not be able to resolve this just from the PDF…
Charlie,
Is there a way to set up the shipping and handling charge so that the charge can be placed in the footer instead of a detail line and the subtotal excludes the shipping and handling charge? Thank you.
Kathleen, QuickBooks doesn’t have the ability to do that.
My company produces an add-on product, CCRQInvoice, that has the ability to do that under certain circumstances. You would have to contact me directly to get a copy of the program that would allow you to do this, as this feature is in a beta-test release (not the release that you would download from our web site). As it stands now, you would identify a particular item as your “shipping charge” item. Add it to the invoice as a normal line. Then print with our program and we would take that particular item and print it in the footer instead of the detail (and handle the subtotals, etc., properly).
Charlie,
The sales tax amount is being included in the Total Amount on my sales orders. When I run the “Open Sales Orders by Customer”, the sales tax amounts are included in these totals. The only way I can determine my actual sales bookings is to run the “Open Sales Orders by Item” report, not a very elegant solution. The sales tax information also shows up on a Sales Order Acknowledgement form I created and the tax amount is included in the Totals. Is this the way QB 2010 Premier Warehouse & Distribution is supposed to operate? I have posted this on the Community forum but have not gotten a satisfactory answer. Would appreciate your thoughts.
Charlie,
I got my answer from the Intuit Community forum – modify the “Open Sales Orders by Customer” report. I added an item filter that includes only inventory items thereby excluding sales tax amounts from my open sales order totals. Also changed from summary to detail, added and removed columns and got just the report that I want. I am now trying to figure out how to add subtotals to the report.
I hope you have written an article on creating and modifying custom detail and summary transaction reports. The Help information in QuickBooks on this subject is very strung out. Your writing is very clear and easy to understand.
Many thanks.
Kathleen, I’m glad you got your answer from the Intuit Community forum – a wonderful resource.
Charlie;
I have the same problem that Kate explained at the top of this post. I added in the sales tax as you recommended however it did NOT remove the line from the body of the invoice. I’m wondering if you were able to resolve this for Kate and if so, could you describe how to overcome this problem please?
many thanks!
Arie, with Kate, my recollection was that she actually altered the sales tax box in the Layout Designer, so it wasn’t the right box.
If you print an invoice with one of the standard Intuit invoices, such as “Product Invoice Modern” which includes the sales tax in the footer, does that work correctly?
to get rid of the sales tax inside description you have to add “sales tax summery” box to footer.
I ended up having a tiny sts field in a random corner with white text to get rid of it.
Charlie, I have rather unique situation. I have a sales tax item group that I use to assess certain taxes, however I want QB to print the detail of the actual items on the invoice rather than the “description” and total rate reflected on the Sales Tax Group. Is there a way to do this?
You can add each of the individual sales tax items as line items in the invoice, possibly.
Please note that I don’t normally recommend that – and I haven’t tested things enough to know if they flow through the sales tax reports properly if you use them this way. You should set up a test company to play with this before trying it in “production”.
Thanks for that. I actually tried that and it works well if you don’t use the subtotal line item to add together multiple items, but as soon as you add the subtotal line item on the top line of tax rates gets calculated the rest drop to $0.
Yes, good point. My concern is if the values show properly in the sales tax reports. They should, but I haven’t tested that.
how do you invoice an invoice in quickbooks if you have one item at one rate and another item at another rate
Iris, that is an odd situation, because TYPICALLY sales tax is based on the location involved, so you would have one address on an invoice.
The simplest approach is to have two invoices, one at each rate.
You CAN play with putting sales tax items in the invoice as a line item. Add the sale item, put a sales tax item or group under it to apply the tax to that item. Add another sale item, then add the other sales tax item under that. You have to play with this, as there are drawbacks depending on how you set things up. You need a non-taxable rate to add at the sales tax field in the bottom. And you might see things show up oddly in your sales tax liability report (it can be addressed). I haven’t worked out all of the details on this – make a test company and play with it.
awesome! worked for me!
Hi there,
Is there a way to make the line product subtotal (amount in the above template) display the tax total of that particular item?
eg.
item 1 – cost before tax : 23 – cost after tax: 24
as opposed to
item 1 – cost before tax : 23 – amount: 23
Mark: Not all in one line. Each line represents a posting to an account, and sales tax is a separate account from the sale of the item. So QB doesn’t put it on one line.
You could use a third party product (such as CCRQInvoice, which my company produces: http://www.ccrsoftware.com/CCRQInvoice/InvoiceQ.htm ) to give an approximation of that, but you might run into some issues with rounding errors because of the way that QB handles sales tax.
Hi
Were you able to help Kate resolve the issue of tax appearing both in the body of the invoice and the footer? I have tried everything you suggested above and can’t seem to remove it from the body and only show in the footer.
Thanks
Yes, she had made some alterations to the form so it wasn’t set up correctly.
If you use one of the standard forms, unchanged, does it appear correctly?
Hello Charlie. I am having the same issue with sales tax appearing both in the body of the invoice and the footer and have done as you suggested with no luck. I started out using a standard template and copying it. Do you know what I might be doing wrong? Thanks.
Tanya, I don’t have a recommendation. I can’t get that to happen. If you can send me a PDF copy of an invoice that shows this, and export your template as a DES file (from the Templates menu) and send that to me, and tell me what edition of QB you are using, I can look at it and see if there is something obvious. My email is in the “about” page of this blog.
Hi Charlie, I am using a standard service invoice, I have no problem to show the vat column on the body and footer, but when I try to issue an invoice, I only can see the amount column, so i entered the net price, I hoped the vat will show automatically on the invoice, unfortunately it did not. can you help me to have my vat amount to show on the invoice, please!