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QuickBooks Online Automated Sales Tax
QuickBooks Online Automated Sales Tax
Derek Deng avatar
Written by Derek Deng
Updated over a week ago

Recently QuickBooks Online has changed how they operate so that all new QuickBooks Online accounts have Automated Sales Taxes enabled. While this makes it easier to be compliant, it makes it more difficult to use ServiceBridge because QuickBooks Online has yet to update their 3rd Party Developer integration to support automated sales taxes. Until QuickBooks Online updates their 3rd Party API, this is the workaround to get proper sales taxes in ServiceBridge from QuickBooks Online.

1. Before we begin, lets confirm we have QuickBooks Online setup correctly. Login to QuickBooks Online and go to the Taxes section in the menu at the left and press the Set up sales tax button:

2. Your company's physical address needs to be confirmed. Once you do this, QuickBooks Online will automatically select the correct tax collection agency for your company.

3. If you operate in other states, you can add additional tax agencies (for different tax rates):

4. Great, now you have QuickBooks Online setup properly. The next step is to get those tax rates into ServiceBridge. An important part is, that creating an Agency in QuickBooks Online, does not automatically synchronize the tax codes to ServiceBridge. The tax codes are synced to QuickBooks Online only after a first invoice for that Agency's territory is created.

It means that if you have a new tax agency in QuickBooks Online, when creating a first Customer in that territory, you will not see this tax code in the dropdown at the Default Tax field. You should mark this Customer as taxable, but leave it without the tax code:

When the new Customer for that Agency's territory is created, you need to create an invoice for this Customer in order to sync the tax codes from QuickBooks Online.

Again, when you create this first invoice, you should leave it without taxes, as the taxes are not yet synchronized from QuickBooks Online:

When you create this invoice, you will see a spinning wheel

at the top of the Invoice. It means that the Invoice is being synced from ServiceBridge to QuickBooks Online.

When the synchronization is finished, you need to do the synchronization from QuickBooks to ServiceBridge. To do so, go to Company settings, navigate to QuickBooks section and press the 'Synchronize' button:

After the synchronization is finished, you will see the new tax code in the Taxes section:

Now you can assign this tax code to the Customer that was recently created. You need to open the Customer record and press the 'Edit' button:

The pop-up window opens and now in the Default Tax dropdown you can see the new tax code:

When the tax codes are already synced to ServiceBridge, you will not need to do all these steps for the new Customers at the same territory. These steps are needed only for the first Customer of the new tax Agency.

Now as you have the tax code synced to ServiceBridge, you can fix the Invoice that was created without taxes. You need to open the Invoice and press the 'Edit' button. When the pop-up window appears, scroll down to the Invoice Items section, press the pencil icon on any Invoice Item:

Then, click the checkmark button and this will refresh the tax rate on the invoice:

After these steps are completed, it will be easier to select the tax codes. It will appear in the dropdown of the Default tax, when you create a new Customer for this territory. Also, on the invoice the tax code will be automatically pre-selected for you.

As it was mentioned before, this is a temporary workaround for the new Automated Sales Tax model and ServiceBridge is now working to provide integral Automated Sales Tax model support for QuickBooks Online.

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