As you would suppose the Sales Tax Item sets up to collect your state sales taxes.

QB has some limitations with sales tax that are here to stay from the looks of things. Sales tax is a one ratefor all items kind of thing. You cannot charge sales tax on a portion of the total amount for an item, or havesales tax brackets, or ...

The Sales Tax part of QB creates its own sales tax payable account. You can not create another one, nor canyou point an Other Charge item at the sales tax payable account.

You can set up as many sales tax items as you wish, and as long as the sales tax item has a tax agency (vendorname in the vendor list) QB will collect sales tax. If you have different vendors QB will isolate them so thatwhen you use the pay sales tax applet you can choose which one to pay.

Because sales tax is handled separately, you have to use a sales tax group to charge several sales tax rates atone time. You cannot use a normal group, it must be a sales tax group.

And the sales tax group has a bug. What QB does is calculate the sales tax for each item in the sales tax group.And then it rounds it off to dollars and cents. Then it adds up all the rates for the final amount. This some-times leads to a penny difference between what we would calculate and what QB calculates, there is no fix.

Give it name that tells you something, state, city, zip it all depends on how you have to track it.

The description here is useless as far as sales documents go, but it does help when you read the item list.

Set the Tax Rate, make sure you include the % sign

This is the vendor you set up, you have to set up a vendor to pay the sale tax to before you create the sales tax item. The vendor should be the name of the state agency you pay sales tax to.

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So to show you the effect of what you can do, I have set the date field to the following options:Font: Bold Italic MaroonSize: 16Border: top border missing Medium Rounded Corners Dashed Line 2pt thicknessBorder Color: Red

It is going to look funny. I would never do this in the real world, this is just an example of how you can playaround.

This is the third TAB called Background.

The background color box is grayed out until you set acheck mark for Fill Background.

When you do that then you can click the color block andchoose the color that will be printed as the background forthe field. I picked this light blue to show you how itwould look.

In the real world I never use the background.

Because I made the font size 16, the stock box wasnot large enough, so I had to enlarge it. To make thislook right I would have to set the box just above it tothe same settings except leave the bottom border off.

Then it would look like the next screen shot.

It does draw your eye to it.

With the top border of the bottom block andthe bottom border of the top block missing, itlooks like it is one field.

I usually set the top and bottom borders tooff. Like in the Invoice # field next to it.

The faint line shows where the border wouldbe if it was being drawn, it will not showwhen the invoice is used or printed.

I know that the clearing expense account has a balance of $123.00, but if I was not sure I could pull up theaccount list and run a quick report on the account to see. This often becomes necessary when you pay truckingplus import duties or some other expense directly associated with getting the widget.

Bring up inventory adjust, set it to a value adjustment, select the clearing account as the adjustment account.

Then set the New Qty to 100, (you are not increasing the quantity here but you have to tell QB to keep it thesame).

Then add the amount in the clearing account (123.00 in this case) to the Current Value and enter it in the NewValue box. Double check the Total Value of Adjustment area to insure you did the math right. And then save it.

The bottom of the widget item screenshows an average cost of 2.23 each.

The TransactionJournal showsthat we created aliability (credit)and increasedInventory asset by223.00

And when you do you get this screen

Put a check mark next to the bill you want to pay. QB has a quirk (bug), if you select several bills QB will add them together and pay them all with one check or credit card charge.

Select whether you will write a check or charge it on a credit card.

Select the correct Bank or Credit Card.

When you click the button that says “Pay Selected Bills” (not shown but it is at the bottom) QB will pay the billmaking the correct entries in the register, and then it will ask you if you want to pay another.

It asks you that even if there is no other bill to pay!

A note on the bug in QB where it lumps all the bills together and pays them with one entry. When you go to thestore in the morning and charge a shirt, and then later your wife goes to the store and charges a dress, whathappens on your statement? There are two charges.

If you lump them together as a single charge when you pay bills, it will be very hard to reconcile the statementwith the QB charges.

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