Newsletter

Tricks of the Trade

Every day, members of The Sleeter Group Consultants Network tackle the day-to-day problems of their clients in the real world. The following is an example problem and solution that surfaced this month on our Sleeter Group Consultants Network E-Mail Group.

Question: I have found the description of recording daily POS sales summaries in the The Sleeter Group’s December 2000 newsletter quite helpful. However, my POS accrues sales tax, but it contains rounding differences and adjustments. When I enter a daily total sales figure into a QuickBooks receipt or invoice, QuickBooks uses a fixed tax rate to keep track of sales tax. How is it possible to account for the adjustment?

Doug Sleeter answered: For recording daily sales summaries from a POS z-tape, or other source that contains the total sales activity for the retail store, the 2000 newsletter article describes the general process. Of course, this method only applies when you do not have a POS software (e.g. QB POS, or AccuPOS) that automatically feeds sales information into QuickBooks Financial Software.

Each day, you should record the totals from the z-tapes from the cash register(s). However, to handle the issue of sales tax roundoff, that is, when the cash register collects a certain amount for sales tax, but the QuickBooks sales tax calculation on the sales receipt is off by a few cents, here is what you need to do.

1. Create a "zerotax" sales tax item that charges 0%.
2. On all sales receipts that you use to record the daily sales, use this zerotax sales tax item at the bottom.
3. Enter all the sales items on the face of the sales receipt and then add the actual sales tax item in the body of the sales receipt with the actual sales tax amount.

I like to create a zero-dollar sales receipt that includes all sales items, sales tax, and payment items for the amounts received by VISA/MC, AMEX, Checks, etc. The key is that this sales receipt completely zeros out each day. If for some reason it doesn’t zero out, you can add an over/short item that points to some expense account and enter whatever amount necessary to force the sales receipt to zero out.

So the lines would look like this:

• Sales Item 1 – Electrical 325.00 Total Daily Sales for this item
• Sales Item 2 – Retouching 95.00 Total Daily Sales for this item
• Sales Item 3 – Case 450.00 Total Daily Sales for this item
• Sales Tax – Contra Costa 39.38 Sales Tax Collected (Per Z-Tape)
• Payment1 – VISA/MC received -300.00 VISA/Mastercard Payments Received
• Payment2 – AMEX received -308.38 AMEX Payments Received
• Payment2 – Checks/Cash Received -300.00 Checks/Cash Payments Received
• Over/Short -1.00 Force sales receipt to zero
• Sales tax item at bottom – Zerotax 0.00
• Total at bottom of sales receipt 0.00