If invoicing is done externally how doe you enter sales tax in quick books to track for the end of the period payout to cra?

Hello jbaker-waverleya,

Welcome back to the community forum. I can see how working with invoices outside of the QuickBooks Online software and then trying to use the sales tax module in the software to calculate what you'd file with the CRA would cause a bit of a tricky situation. I can go over how QuickBooks Online interacts with its sales tax module and what you can consider for taking care of this situation.

Tracking sales tax in QuickBooks Online is generally as easy as recording transactions and assigning sales tax codes to them. Since you're invoicing using another means, the program won't have been doing that all along. What you can consider is something like a journal entry to account for those amounts now in your books. I can't give any recommendations on how to specifically format this journal entry for this purpose, but I will say that in order for sales tax on a journal entry to impact the sales tax module, you'll need to map the sales tax account as its own line on the entry.

To learn more about how you might go about using this option, I encourage you to work with an accountant. An accountant will know best how to guide you through this, including what accounts to use and even if a journal entry is the appropriate course of action here. QuickBooks Online's My Accountant tab offers you the chance to add an accountant user directly to your account to help in your books, and if you don't have an accountant yet, the Find a pro to help button takes you to our directory of accountants who you could work with.

Another thing I recommend considering is using a third-party app to sync your invoices to QuickBooks Online. The Apps tab is home to our list of partner applications that connect other services, including invoicing services, to QuickBooks Online to sync the data from one to the other. This is beneficial for these sorts of situations so that you don't have to try to account for the sales tax in your books after the fact. Head to that tab and search for the invoicing service you're using to see if it connects to the program.

I hope this has shed some light on the options. Don't hesitate to leave a reply on this thread if you have additional questions.