Reporting the amount of taxable sales and tax collected

NOTE: This information has been updated and added to the documentation under Taxes Setup (https://campgroundmaster.com/help/taxessetup.html).  Refer to that for current information.

Original article:

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 the amount of sales revenue that was taxed.

Assuming that you're using the tax categories and auto-tax calculations as designed in the software (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), 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), click the "Charges by Category" button.

- Click "Summary Options" again.

- Select the "Quarterly" option in the Summarize period group.

- Click the "Filter..." button and select the appropriate From and To dates for the quarter, 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).

Campground Master doesn't specifically flag each charge transaction as to whether it's taxable or not, so to get the amount of sales taxed then you may need to reverse-calculate it.  For instance if your tax rate is 5% and the tax collected is $100, then the amount taxed would be $100 / .05 = $2000.

Alternate method:

You can also set up the Transaction Categories to make it easier to get the amount taxed.  Ideally you want to make sure that any taxable charges go in separate categories from non-taxable ones.  Here are a couple ways you can do this:

In the simplest case, perhaps Daily and Weekly rates are taxed but Monthly rates are not -- so you can just add the daily and weekly charges and leave out Monthly.  You might even want to add a "T" in front of the categories that are taxed.

If the division is not quite as clear, for instance if some daily stays are non-taxed due to government-employee discounts, then you could add a "Daily non-taxed" category for this.  Be sure to set up your Rates so that the correct category is used for taxed vs. non-taxed rates.

Keep in mind that most Discounts are pre-tax, so those need to be subtracted from the taxable Charges for calculate the amount taxed.  Again, if some discounts apply to non-taxed categories, then you can make a separate category for non-taxed discounts.  Or better yet, avoid using the generic "Discount" category for discounts and always select the appropriate category when a discount is entered (or set up in a Rate), e.g. use the Daily rate category if it's a discount off of the daily rate.