Is there a way for just the tax on a deposit to show up on sale tax to pay CRA?

Welcome back hbpierce,

I see that you asked a similar question about recording a deposit with sales tax earlier in the week and have a feeling this question is related to that. It's important to me that you get the guidance you're looking for with this, and I'm here to help point you in the right direction.

From your previous question, it sounds like when you accept a deposit from a customer that the sales tax calculated for the full total of that work needs to be included with the deposit. For instance, if you had a $100 job for a customer + HST, the total would be $113. Let's say for the deposit you're looking for $20, plus the total sales tax. This would mean you'd like to receive $33 from your customer as the deposit and then the balance would be due later.

If that's the case, QuickBooks Online doesn't have an integrated solution for this kind of situation, but you may be able to tweak the steps outlined in our Record a retainer or deposit article to work in your favour. For instance, you can consider using these steps to record the deposit and manually adjust the sales tax calculated in the subtotal on the transaction to be the amount that you're looking for (from my example, it would be the $33). When you're ready to record the balance due, you could then manually adjust the sales tax on that entry so that it was zeroed out. If you'd like to try this out before entering anything like this into your books, you're welcome to use the steps in that article in the QuickBooks Online Test Drive account.

Because this is a workaround, I highly recommend consulting an accountant to see if these steps will work the way you need them to and if they're appropriate for your books. Like I said, you may be able to tweak those steps, but the situation may call for using something like a journal entry to account for this kind of transaction instead. An accountant would know best.

The My Accountant tab in QuickBooks Online is also something you can use to your benefit. The tab includes an email invite field to bring your accountant on as a user to the program. This gives them the access and tools they need to help you out. If you don't have an accountant, the Find a pro to help button is at your disposal instead, leading you to our list of QuickBooks-certified accountants near you.

If you'd like to leave feedback about any of the features available in QuickBooks Online, feel free to do so using these steps: How do I submit feedback? This helps our product development team get a sense of what users would like to see in the program. We also have the QuickBooks Online Feature and Product Updates page where you can keep an eye on what's new to the software.

Wishing you the best with this!