shtewps

Spoke to my accountant about this. It's actually pretty simple. You'll be adding CRA as a Supplier and when you remit your HST you simply create a purchase/immediate payment and choose whatever account the funds are coming from (ie: Checking). For Account Allocation you will be choosing your 'Sales Tax Collected' accounted and from there you will be entering a negative value totalling the amount you are paying back. Also change the transaction type to CR. This will deduct your payment from your running total of Tax Collected (tax owing). Hope this helps! Screenshot:

Geez really? Can you post some screen shots?

Awesome! Thanks so much for updating this thread with that info. How is the issue fixed? Can you now choose liability accounts under the "sales tax paid" option or does it just create an account for you and automatically tally the on-going taxes paid like in the earlier releases of this software

So I managed to create a new liability account ("sales tax paid 2c") and have it show up on my balance sheet. However the managing of accounts is not automatic and I think this is where the bug lies. I created the new liability account but in my tax option I am still not able to select a liability account under "sales tax paid". I can still only select expense accounts (pointless as they dont show up on the balance sheet and deduct from your HST owing to the gov't). When I go into the journal and manually change the tax paid on a certain transaction to my new "sales tax paid 2c" liability account, it shows up in the balance sheet as it should. This is just to confirm that additional liability accounts will properly show up on the balance sheet. If I am to calculate a proper running total of my tax paid, I will need to manually edit the journal every time if I want those totals to go to a liability account. Can someone from NCH confirm that it is in fact a bug that will not let us choose a liability account from the tax options > sales tax paid? Thank you.

If I change "sales tax paid 2B" to a liability account, I am unable to select it within my tax options as the default sales tax paid account. Therefore Express Accounts will no longer calculate my taxes paid under "sales tax paid 2B". I think this is where the bug lies - Regardless of what the proper account type should be or how express accounts handles them, I am unable to select a liability account (like I used to be in the older versions) from the tax options for sales tax paid. Under sales tax collected, you can definitely still choose liability accounts. I think technically the tax you pay should be considered an asset since its an amount of money that you own (as long as your tax collected amount is higher) and will eventually get to keep since only the difference is remitted, but I can see why it would also be considered an expense since it first comes from your pocket as the result of a payment. Either way, it seems impossible to continue to calculate your sales tax paid and have it show up in the balance sheet without manually editing the journal and changing the account back to the original "sales tax paid 2" liability account. I think you're absolutely right here. It definitely seems like a bug but it's weird how it hasn't been caught yet. Surely people must be checking their balance sheets on the later versions of this program and noticing that their tax paid isn't being calculated under the liability account that it once was. EDIT: Now that you bring up the "negative liability" account type (which to me sounds like an asset), it makes sense that express accounts was using "sales tax paid" as a liability account but making it negative. Not sure what settings make a liability account negative but it seems like express accounts was doing this just fine in its earlier version as my "sales tax paid 2" account always shows on the balance sheet in brackets making it a deductible amount from my sales tax collected amount.

Great suggestion there, thanks! I went ahead and created a new expense account to use as the "new" sales tax paid account. I also set it as the default linked account for "sales tax paid". Not too sure if this is necessary or not, but sounded right. Then I went into my tax settings and under HST, set the "sales tax paid" option to the new "sales tax paid 2B" account. Then I went and created a dummy purchase payment to see if the sales tax paid in the new "sales tax paid 2B" account would be shown on the balance sheet. The bad news is that "sales tax paid 2B" does not show on the balance sheet. It still only lists "sales tax paid 2". The good news is that when I go into the journal, that transaction had allotted the correct tax amount to "sales tax paid 2B". I just have no idea how to get it to show up on the balance sheet. If I run an income statement, "sales tax paid 2B" shows up with an amount of $11.50. However all the other tax paid totals for my "sales tax paid 2" account doesn't show up in the income statement (not too sure if it would though given that it's a liability account). A workaround to having the balance sheet continue to maintain my sales tax paid numbers under the "sales tax paid 2" account is so go into the journal and manually edit the accounts for that transaction and choose "sales tax paid 2" for the tax portion. When I do that it adds that tax total to the running total of HST paid and shows up correctly in the balance sheet. But there has to be an explanation to this because NCH changed the ability to use liability accounts for sales tax paid. The older version set up my sales tax paid account as a liability and the new version will only let me choose an expense account now so it stops calculating and I can't seem to find a way to have an new expense account as a 'sales tax paid' account show up in the balance sheet. Ahhh... Again, thank you very much for your insight. Although it's not 100% solved I do feel like we're making some headway here and I'm getting a better understanding of things. Cheers.

Thank you so much for the reply here. It's really appreciated. In the older Express Accounts version, both tax collected and tax paid pulldowns showed the same accounts. When I first started using express accounts I guess it automatically created both of these tax accounts as liability accounts and in the recent version they changed sales tax paid to be an expense account instead of a liability account. What I'd like to do is fix the problem at the core. When I run a balance sheet is shows me all of the tax I paid vs. the tax i've collected and shows the difference as a liability which is expected. If I change the sales tax paid account to something other than the 'sales tax paid 2' liability account, it doesnt seem to show up in my balance sheet any more and does not calculate against the sales tax that i've collected. Would you happen to know the best way to take the value of my 'sales tax paid 2' liability account, add that value to a new sales tax paid expense account, and have the new account show up in my balance sheet? Here is a quick glance at my balance sheet. Although both of my tax collected and tax paid accounts are liabilities, it still deducts my tax paid from my tax collected to show the value of what I need to remit. Again, your help and assistance is extremely appreciated. Thank you very much.

I updated Express Accounts and it seems that I can no longer track the sales tax that I pay on expenses into my "sales tax paid 2" account. In my previous version express accounts would record a running total of the HST I have paid under 'sales tax paid 2' (2 being for the second year in business I guess) and when I run a balance report it would show sales tax paid 2 on the report as well as sales tax collected. Now when I process expense payments it just keeps track of the HST I paid under some random other account and when I go to "options > tax > HST" and then "sales tax paid", I can't select the "sales tax paid 2" account from the list! It only seems to show expense accounts there, but where it says "sales tax collected" I can still choose the "sales tax collected 2" account. What the heck is going on here? I can manually edit the journal entry back to "sales tax paid 2" and it will update the running total but its so unnecessary as it worked fine before. Here are a couple of pics to help describe the situation. PLEASE if you know the solution here, let me know - I would very much appreciate it.

I guess this is more of an accounting question but Im curious as to what I should be doing in express accounts after I file the taxes for my business? For example, how do you handle the HST remittance that you pay back to the gov't? (Canada) Thanks kindly for your help.

After updating to the latest version of Express Accounts; When I go to look at old invoices or receipts, the tax name (which would normally read "HST") seems to be missing. The tax value still shows and the totals are correct, however the tax name has just vanished. If I create a new invoice (with the new app update) the tax name seems to show up again. Apparently it just wont show for anything older. Is this normal? If not, would one know how to fix it?

Thanks a lot for the information! Although I'm having a bit of trouble finding that option.. Could you elaborate a bit more as to where it is? Ive checked the navigation panes and context menus but dont see anything related to a transfer. EDIT: My app was a few subversions out of date. After installing the latest 4.62 I can now see the option. Thanks again!

What is the correct method of transferring money from your checking account balance to your petty cash balance?? Thanks in advance!

Hello, Thanks kindly for your reply. Sorry for not being clear, but by cost; I did not mean the price of an item. I meant the actual cost of the item to the company (prior to resale) whereby Express Accounts is able to use that value to show actual profits. When you create an item, you can set its price.. and cost (which is unknown to the customer) I am looking to able to set the cost to items that I arbitrarily add to invoices that have not been pre-determined. It seems I can add any other value to these 'on the fly' items but the cost. Cheers

Hi there, I would like to know if its possible to add a cost associated with a non-generated item that you enter on a customer's invoice. For example, I go to invoice a customer and add invoice items that I have not previously set up a name, cost or price. It seems I can enter any information I want in the invoice except for a cost unless I have already created this item. My business has many variable costs and services which will change almost between every customer. It would be very helpful if I could just add our cost of that specific order to the invoice on the fly instead of making a large amount of items first and then constantly changing them. Thanks in advance for the help.

In case you havent found a solution to this issue, here is how you edit the balances of any of your accounts. I was having the same problem as you and noticed that other people were as well. This worked great for me as I was able to edit any account and bring everything back to $0.00 balances without deleting the business profile which I had already created! 1. Find out which accounts are still reporting an open balance (even though you have deleted any applicable invoices) - Reports > Balance Sheet... > View 2. If any of the items listed in this report are showing a balance, note their account number and go to View > Chart of Accounts.. 3. Open the account you would like to clear or mofify the balance of and change the "opening balance field". If any of these accounts show this field as greyed out (not editable), in my case it was 'historical balances'... proceed to step 4! 4. Back up your current data - Accounts > Back up Data... > Backup to removable drive > Select some place ie: your desktop 5. Navigate to the 'Accounts' folder inside your backup folder (ie: c:\...\...\desktop\ExpressAccounts-Backup-2012-XX-XX\Accounts) 6. Select the account number of the desired account you with to edit and use a text editor such as Notepad++ or simply notepad to edit the account file 7. Notice the balance will be in a couple of locations within this file so make sure you edit both locations to whatever value you prefer (ie: "0") and save. 8. Restore your backup! - Accounts > Restore Data... > Restore from Backup > 'your backup directory here' 9. Run the report for your Balance Sheet again and behold your new (proper) balance!