Sales tax is one of those things every shop has to get right and nobody wants to spend extra time on. Charge it wrong and you're either eating the difference or explaining it to a customer. Lose track of what you collected and month-end turns into a scramble.
My Shop Assist handles sales tax from the first line on a job all the way to the payment you send the state, whether QuickBooks runs your books or you do everything in MSA.
Set up your tax rate
Start by setting your tax rate in MSA. Once it's in place, it's applied automatically wherever tax belongs, so nobody has to remember the number or type it in by hand.
Apply tax to parts and tasks
Tax is set on parts and on tasks, so you control exactly what gets taxed. Parts and labor don't always follow the same rules, and MSA lets you set each one the way your state requires.
Tax-exempt customers
Wholesale accounts, resellers, and other exempt customers can be marked tax exempt. Once a customer is set, their jobs come through without sales tax, so you're not fixing every invoice one at a time.
Change the tax on an individual job
Every so often a single job needs to be handled differently. You can change the tax on that one job without touching the customer's settings or your shop defaults.
If you use QuickBooks
Sales tax syncs with QuickBooks along with the rest of your invoices, so your books show what was collected without double entry. You can also see sales tax collected right inside MSA on the Jobs Report.
If you don't use QuickBooks
You can manage sales tax entirely in MSA. Turn on sales tax reporting, and your invoices report the sales tax due on each job. That all feeds into the Sales Tax Report, where you can see what you owe for the period.
Freeze the month, mark it paid, record it
When you're ready to file, freeze the month so nothing changes behind you, mark it as paid, and record the payment. Each month closes out cleanly, and you have a record of what was collected and what was paid.
Watch the walkthrough above to see sales tax set up and reported from start to finish.