Sales Tax is suddenly off - D-Tools Forum

avaltdan · 03-30-2011, 07:44 PM

Up until today the sales tax on my projects has always been extremely accurate.

Now it is off slightly. A few notes:

1. All of my sell prices (that I am aware of) are "whole" numbers - no rounding up or down.

2. No labor is taxed (we don't even use the labor portion of DTools)

Example - I have a project that the equipment and materials total $29,050.00 and my sales tax rate is 6% (I confirmed that it was set to EXACTLY 6% in the "application set-up screen"). The tax should be $1,743.00, but it is showing up as $1,742.99. That is obviously wrong. I had no problems of this sort until today - and I haven't changed anything in my system today.

Any suggestions?

**Ryan Brown** · 03-30-2011, 10:44 PM

I believe the tax is calculated on a per item basis - and then summed together to give the net tax (rather than sum all the parts and then calculate the tax on that rounded number).

So when each item's price is rounded to 2 decimals, then taxed, then all of it added together, it could cause it to be off when calculated the way you're explaining (project total *6%)

I'm not 100% positive this is the way it is done behind the scenes, but from what I can tell it is.

- so what may be happening is that the rounding (down) occurred at the item level by the 1 cent it is off.

I hope this helps clarify things (I do recognize I'm not providing a solution)

avaltdan · 03-31-2011, 02:19 PM

Thanks Ryan,

But as I said, I don't believe anything is "rounding". All of my sell price items are hard entered to TWO decimal places. And no programming or labor is added to any items.

This has NEVER happened until yesterday - but as I said, I didn't make any system changes.

**Ryan Brown** · 03-31-2011, 03:10 PM

Dan, I have created a D-Tools report (attached here) that breaks out every line item in the job along with its related labor and taxes. I've formatted the number fields so they do not show rounding but will print all digits.

I think this will atleast allow you to break out and easily review the project items to see where the offense is occurring.

I'm sure this could be useful to others as well.

fryeguy · 03-31-2011, 04:19 PM

Dan, do you actually have reports from before and after this problem to verify?
As Ryan said, sales tax is typically calculated on a per item basis and then totalled up.
I believe this is because you cannot explicitly call for "Project Equipment Total" in a report. The reporting engine applies the sales tax XML schema to each item which returns the sales tax associated with the item and calculates a running total until it loops through all tiems. The value at the end is sales tax value for the project.

To see that this is the case simply choose to edit an item in your project data matrix and from the price tab click view. This window will show you the sales tax value calculated per item.

So here is where it gets weird: Quickbooks sums up taxable items and calculates sales tax on the total...

avaltdan · 03-31-2011, 06:45 PM

Thanks guys - I'm buried in a few other projects right now but will look further into it ASAP.

Thanks again for the feedback.

Bill Battaglia · 06-03-2011, 04:07 PM

Wait to you start utilzing it with a Delta (Change Order) - Tax field in Ryan's Report will always display a Postive Number does not reflect correctly if that was removed.

But yours is to refelct Rounding..they round Tax to 2 decimals and others to 4 so it is hard to get to spot on.

Good luck,