Taxes Reporting

Proper tax calculation and ease of reporting depends greatly on the way your set up your Transaction Categories in the Pick Lists, as well as properly choosing tax categories and properly configuring your Rates and Inventory Items (if the POS option is used), as well as properly entering manual Charges.  See Taxes Setup for more details.

Most businesses need to fill out a quarterly sales tax report for your state (or similar reporting for other taxes).  For these reports you need to find the amount of sales tax collected and/or the amount of sales revenue that was taxed.

Assuming that you're using the tax categories and auto-tax calculations as designed and explained above (as opposed to including tax in your prices to make them even dollar amounts), getting the amount of sales tax collected is easy:

- Click on the Transactions tab view.

- Click the "Summary Options" button (if you don't see Summary Options, check the Summarize box first),

- If you report based on when they're collected (paid to you), e.g. Cash-basis, click the "Receipts by Category" button under Quick Reports.  

- Otherwise, if you need to report based on when they are charged to the customer (whether paid or not), e.g. Accrual basis, click the "Charges by Category" button.

- Click "Summary Options" again.

- Select the "Quarterly" option in the Summarize period group (or 'Monthly", as appropriate).

- Click the "Filter..." button and select the appropriate From and To dates for the quarter or month, then click OK.

- Click OK again.

Along with all other Transaction Categories, this will show the actual amount of tax income for the quarter, for each tax category you use (e.g. Sales Tax, Hotel Tax, etc).  However, see below for proper Taxable Sales calculation.

IMPORTANT: Do NOT use the "Taxes by Tax Category" report unless your accounting is accrual-based and tax liability is according to when you take the reservation, or if you're entering (or auto-calculating) charges/taxes only when the customer checks in or pays in full.  Like "Charges by Category", "Taxes by Tax Category" reports tax amounts as of when they're entered in Campground Master -- so unless you're using Campground Master in the "recommended" way (entering no charges until the customer checks in and/or pays), this will show taxes sooner than they're due.  If your accounting is cash-based and you want to report tax as it's collected (paid), use the "Receipts by Category" report in the procedures above.

Taxable Sales

Now you will need to use the report above get the actual amount of taxable vs non-taxable sales.  Campground Master doesn't specifically flag each charge transaction as to whether it's taxable or not, so getting the proper amount of sales depends on how things were set up.

1. Add up the taxable categories -- As explained, this depends on having your Transaction Categories appropriately set up so you can tell exactly which categories are taxable vs non-taxable.  Given this proper setup and usage of the categories, you can simply add up the categories for each value.

2. Reverse-calculate it from the tax categories, e.g. "Sales Tax" -- for instance if your tax rate is 5% and the tax collected is $100, then the amount of taxable sales would be $100 / .05 = $2000.

3. Reverse-calculate it from the sales categories -- If you're including taxes in the sales categories themselves (e.g. if you set up your Rates to include taxes so they are even-dollars amounts, and/or not show taxes separately on receipts), then you will have to calculate it from the total sales in the taxable categories.  For instance if total taxable sales is $2000 and your rate is 5%, then divide by 1.05:  $2000 / 1.05 = $1904.76 taxable sales.

Note that regardless of the method used, expect a small difference between the expected tax on the taxable sales and the actual tax collected.  This is expected due to rounding issues on individual sales.  If there is a large difference, however, then it's due to problems with your taxes setup or categories setup, or mistakes in sales entry.