How do I add another HST account to record our Subcontractors HST expense?

Hi darciemills,

It sounds like your company has some pretty specific needs when it comes to recording sales tax and how it's used for your business. I know how important it is to have your books set up to calculate to meet the requirements for your tax submissions, and I'd be happy to go over how sales tax tracking works in QuickBooks Online.

Setting up and tracking sales tax in the program is a fairly straightforward process of assigning the appropriate tax codes to your transactions. The program takes care of tracking the amounts to the proper sales tax accounts in the chart of accounts and making the calculations in the Taxes tab. When you activate and use sales tax codes, the appropriate accounts are created by default in the chart of accounts so you don't have to worry about that setup.

That being said, there isn't a way set up another HST account to use with your existing sales tax codes. Even if you create a custom tax code for the Canada Revenue Agency in the tax centre, the taxes will automatically track to the GST/HST accounts already in the product. I have a workaround you can consider.

What you can do is set up a custom sales tax agency and custom sales tax code to go with it to track those amounts separately. Doing this will prompt QuickBooks to create the accounts in the chart of accounts to track these amounts and give you the opportunity to separate them from the rest of the sales tax. Here are the steps to do that.

1. Go to the Taxes menu.
2. On the Sales Tax page, choose Manage sales tax.
3. Click the Add tax button at the top.
4. Choose Add a custom tax and agency.
5. Fill out the Tax name, Tax Agency Name, and other fields as needed.
6. Click Add to save it.

Once you've done that, it's just a matter of then using that new code for your subcontractor transactions and QuickBooks will track it for you. Here's an article that has more details about setting up tax codes in the program: How to set up a new sales tax code

Since you have an accountant, I recommend checking in with them to see if this is the best method for recording this in your books. They'll be able to review this setup with you to let you know if this is what they're looking for or not. Feel free to test it out first using the QuickBooks Online test drive account. The test drive account has mock data that you can use to test out features and how things are recording without having to worry about impacting the live data in your books. You can access that account here: Test drive QuickBooks Online

If creating a custom agency and code don't quite work for you, the next step is working with your accountant to find another alternative solution to tracking the sales tax the way you need. If your accountant isn't already a user in your QuickBooks, you can even invite them on so they can see the account setup and QuickBooks' capabilities directly. Just use the invite field in the My Accountant tab to do so.

You're also welcome to share your thoughts and feedback about the options available using the steps outlined here: How do I submit feedback? The comment left through that feature are forwarded to the product development team for consideration as they continue to build upon what QuickBooks has to offer.

I hope this has been helpful!