Friday Review

Wow, it’s Friday again????? ….

This week can be summarized by saying: “classes and taxes” kind of rhymes.

Local winter classes were in full swing this week. I was booked every night between camera, eBay and Internet basics classes. I even have a class tonight – Friday.

During the day I struggled with my taxes. I file sales tax yearly.  Washington state started a new method of sales taxation in July, called Destination Based Sales Tax. So, half of the year I collected state sales tax based on where I do business, and then in July we switched over to collecting tax based on where the customer receives the goods. I think there’s only something like 350 tax districts in WA state, and many of them changed how much they charged per quarter….. OH MY GAWD! what a mess!

The whole idea here (and this is no conspiracy theory – our state government is very open about why they passed this new legislation) is to prepare online sellers for the inevitable coming of collecting sales tax and paying sales tax to all states. All’sI can say, is after this week – the software programs are a long way from helping us here. The venues like PayPal, eBay, Amazon, Etsy, etc are really going to have to improve their software and start collecting it for us – or we’ll drown in paperwork.

So, I finally sat down with all my figures compiled and started the final review process before submitting the information to the state. And I couldn’t get the figures to match – my quickbooks didn’t match what I thought should be taxable income.

Which meant going through each quickbook entry for taxed income. Guess what? The eBay Accounting Assistant has a few more bugs than I realized. It seems that while PayPal doesn’t collect the tax, accounting assistant shows that I collected taxes in Washington DC and Puerto Rico (OK, I can almost understand the DC thing, being another Washington) but Puerto Rico? What’s that about?????

Then after all that, the report still didn’t match. I was ready to pull my hair out when my partner Dany pointed out that the report was defaulting to ‘cash based’ not ‘accrual’.

I finally have everything in order and online forms filled out – the state will get their taxes – all in all about two cents over what they would have received under the original taxing method – and I put it on my goal list to hire an bookkeeper and accountant for next years round…..