Tracking how much sales tax we pay (but still having it show up in expense)

WCC

Hi all,
I don't know if this is doable without some manual effort, but I'm throwing it out there to see if anyone has run into the same situation.

I do the bookkeeping for a small non-profit, which is eligible to claim a 50% GST rebate for most GST paid on purchases. But it does not 'sell' anything so does not collect any GST on sales (and therefore never has anything to remit to the government).

So ... I set up GST as a recoverable sales tax in our accounts, so it shows up on the sales tax reports and we know how much we have paid in order to claim the rebate.

BUT ... the portion of what we pay for an item (say, sheet music - it's a music org) that's sales tax doesn't show up in the 'expense' line for that item. Instead it's in a liability account. Which isn't that useful for us, because we're never going to have any sales tax payable - really all sales tax paid should show up in the expense category for whatever the item is on which we've paid tax.

If I instead set up GST as a 'non-recoverable' sales tax, then it gets folded into the expense line for that item and our expenses are shown correctly. BUT ... the tax paid then doesn't show up anywhere on a report (that I can find), so it doesn't work as a solution to help us track how much sales tax we've paid (in order to claim the rebate).

I hope that makes sense. (It's late and I'm tired.) Anyone else in this situation who's found a solution? (that doesn't involve me having to do a bunch of manual journal entries)

Thanks
Carol

ConnorM

Hey @WCC! Thanks for reaching out here. It's definitely a bit of a head scratcher here, and within the context of Wave, it looks like this would cause you some aggravation. I'm sorry it hasn't been as fluid as we'd like it to be in your scenario. You've outlined a lot of really solid context, and you've answered a lot of the questions I might have had. You're right in that if you mark a GST as 'non-recoverable', it would not show up in any report within Wave. As such, I'm sorry to say that the manual journal entry method is likely going to be your best bet.