Deep Dive: Tax in QuickBooks Online

Rachael Hopkins
Rachael Hopkins Expensify Success Coach - Admin, Expensify Team, Expensify Student Ambassador Posts: 904 Expensify Team
edited February 2022 in Deep Dive Docs

If you are based in a country which charges tax on sales, such as GST, HST or VAT, you can harness the power of Expensify's Tax Tracking functionality in conjunction with your QBO tax rates. (***Please note that there is no way to enable Tax Tracking with policies that are connected to the US version of QuickBooks Online. If you have any questions on how to allow a way to apply taxes after reports are exported, please contact QuickBooks)

This feature allows users to apply a tax rate to each expense, and we calculate the tax component based on that rate.

To set this up, just follow these easy steps (after connecting your Policy to QBO):

  1. Go to Settings > Policies > Group > [Policy Name] > Connections and click Configure
  2. Go to the Coding tab
  3. Enable 'Tax
  4. Hit Save - The Tax Name field and the rate listed under Tax on Purchase Items are now imported into Expensify
  5. Go to Settings > Policies > Group [Policy Name] > Tax to see the taxes imported from QuickBooks Online
You can usee the enable/disable button in the Tax tab to choose which taxes to make available to your employees.

You will also want to set a default tax rate to apply to the Policy in general (this will automatically apply to all new expenses). The defaults selected on the tax page will be applied to all Expenses but the user will have the option to select a tax rate on each expense. 


Please note that tax cannot currently be exported to Journal Entries in QuickBooks Online. 

If one receipt contains multiple tax rates (I'm looking at you EU, UK and Canada), your users will need to split the expense into the relevant portions and set the correct tax rate on each.

Related Articles:

Tagged: