How to pay a Sales Tax invoice?

[Liz]

Maf. King wrote:
> On Monday, 30 January 2017 11:13:17 GMT Nelson Handcock wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Bumping my question - still stuck with this....
>>
>> Thanks & Regards,
>>
>> Nelson Handcock
>
>
> Hi Nelson,
>
> I was going to reply to your original post with a UK-centric viewpoint,
> but
> Geert beat me to it and i thought i wouldn't be adding much to his reply.
>
> Here, we have VAT, which sounds similar to your GST in as much as you
> charge
> some on your invoices, you pay some with your bills, and quarterly, you
> report
> and hand the difference over to the taxman.
>
> IMHO, the calculation for the taxman doesn't give rise to a new invoice
> (in
> the GC sense of the word, needing a supplier and A/P accounts etc.)  What
> you
> have is effectively a statement of facts, with a bottom line of  "pay us
> $x
> now"
>
> The tax demand is asking for the money that belongs to the government,
> which
> you have collected on their behalf along with your invoices.  Yes, you can
> offset the bits you have paid out to your suppliers, but in effect what
> they
> are asking for has never been yours; you have been "keeping it safe" for
> them.
>
> So I create a "manual transaction" from the bank account, with (at least)
> 3
> splits, not an "AP transaction".  This transaction reduces the bank
> balance by
> the total that is due to the tax dept, and at the same time zeroes out the
> "Tax Collected" and "tax paid" accounts.  The GC transaction should
> balance,
> as Tax Collected - Tax paid = tax due from bank account
>
> That's how I do it in the UK.  YMMV, of course.
>
> HTH,
> Maf.
>

I do mine with multisplits also. I have transactions which contain 0.00
for the amounts in the scheduled transactions list, and put in the
required amounts to return the balances of GST:collected GST:paid and
GST:paid:vehicle to zero.
GST:paid:vehicle has to have initial arithmetic to pay my personal share
of the car costs.
My PAYG tax is also in those transactions as I pay that monthly.

Importantly, the date of those transactions is fixed to the last day of
the month, even though I really pay the owed money some weeks later. This
helps me sort out what I have to pay each month.

Liz