What default tax rate should I use for QuickBooks Online?

What default tax rate should I use for QuickBooks Online?

Megan Sullivan

If your QuickBooks Online account is configured to track sales tax such as Goods and Services Tax (GST) or Provincial Sales Tax (PST), you will need to specify the default tax rate for CoConstruct to use for any estimates, invoices, or bills (from your purchase orders) that are pushed from CoConstruct to your accounting system.

Note: If you see this setting but do not have a gross sales tax that you collect from your clients, you may need to go into QuickBooks Online and turn off sales tax tracking. Click here for more information on how to do update your QuickBooks tax configuration.

When those estimates, invoices, and bills are sent over to QuickBooks Online from CoConstruct, QuickBooks will apply a tax automatically. As a result, CoConstruct will not include tax on transactions that are sent over to QuickBooks, instead letting QuickBooks fill in the tax with a tax rate that you have set up in QuickBooks.

Note that you can only specify a single rate here. If you only have one sales tax that you need to track, that makes life easy.

But, for cases where you need to apply multiple tax rates, such as GST and PST, you will want to ensure that you have set up a combined tax rate in QuickBooks Online, such as a Harmonized Sales Tax (HST).

To set up a combined tax rate in QuickBooks Online, go to Taxes > "Add/Edit Tax Rates" > New > "Combined tax rate." When setting it up, you will be able to specify the specific components and rates of your combined tax rate, letting you set up a 5% GST and a 7% PST as components of a single "combined" tax rate, for example.

Then, in CoConstruct's accounting integration settings, simply choose the new combined rate as your "default tax rate." Any transactions that CoConstruct sends over to your QuickBooks Online account will automatically inherit the combined tax rates with the correct individual components based on your QuickBooks Online settings.