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The state where my vacation home is located now requires me to file monthly tax reports. Until 1/1/12, I was allowed to file quarterly tax returns. My accountant tells me that the tax due each month is for the amounts collected that month, regardless of actual rental period dates. The current "Tax Report" for this property is not helpful for these types of monthly or quarterly tax filings. It does give me the taxes charged but categorizes these tax payments by the month that the property was reserved, not the month that they were collected. Can you add a new report entitled "Collections" with both monthly and quarterly collections to date?
Thanks

 
9 Responses:

John Amato, February 13, 2012:

Sure, that's a fine idea, and we will put something together for this.

However, Bookerville is only aware of payments made that have been entered into the Booking Details page. If you are using PayPal or Authorize.net, then it's possible to integrate to the point where these payments are recorded automatically for you. If not, or for any other kinds of payments remitted by guests, you must enter them.

Also - should this report show totals only for taxable items? Is this for the various "tourism" taxes, or is this for income tax purposes? (Or both?)

Thanks,

John
dlxhivac, February 13, 2012:

I realize that bookerville can't track payments made automatically to external credit card processing services. I manually enter each of those payments along with the dates paid into bookerville's payments area for a rental.

The state taxes that I must file monthly are general excise tax and transient accommodation taxes. My accountant said that, for the IRS, I also must report collections in the year received not the year that the rental occurred (when they are not the same year).

It would be good to only total taxable items but that gets tricky. My collections consists of prepayments and remaining balances. These collections include non taxable items such as the cleaning fee and taxes. Would it be possible to calculate and report to us, the taxable amount of each collection?

For instance, my prepayments are 25% of my total. The taxable amount is my prepayment minus 25% of the non taxable amounts in my total. My remaining payments are usually 75% of my total. The taxable amount is my remaining payment minus 75% of the non taxable amounts in my total. If a remaining balance was paid in 2 or more installments, a similar formula would apply. If the payment was X% of the total. The taxable amount is the payment minus X% of the non taxable amounts in the total.
John Amato, February 15, 2012:

I think I understand, but let me see if I can re-state it.

Whenever a booking is made, Bookerville calculates the total taxes for it, and this excludes non-taxable items (some of these are configurable in the Property Setup page).

Given that, then whatever payments for the booking that arrive in a certain time period can be divided into a portion that is for taxes, and a portion that is the rest of the booking total. Example: a booking totals $1,100 and $100 of that is taxes (10%). If you get paid $300 of that in February 2012, we can calculate that $27.27 of that payment is applicable to the taxes, and the remaining $272.73 is towards the rest of the booking. If another payment comes in March for $400 (50% of balance due, let's say), then $36.36 of that is taxes collected, and $363.64 is for the rest of the booking balance. If the final $400 payment arrives in April, then $36.36 of that is taxes, and the rest ($363.64) is the booking amount.

At the end of the payments, you've collected the correct amount of taxes ($100), but it came as $27.27 in Feb., $36.36 in March, and another $36.36 in April. Although there will be some rounding issues (in this case it's off by a penny...)

Does this illustrate what you're describing?

John
dlxhivac, February 15, 2012:

No
The state and IRS want to know the amount of taxable collections. If my rent fee for someone is 1000 and state tax is 10% and cleaning is $200, their total payment is 1000+100+200 = $1300. The taxable amount of the payment is 1000/1300 = 77%. My prepayment collected at booking is 25% of total or $325, in this case. The taxable part of the prepayment is 77% times $325= $250. Six mo prior to checkin, I collect the remaining balance, 75% of the total or $975 in this case. Of that $975, 77% ($750) is the taxable amount collected! If you could have a column and total for total amounts collected and total taxable amounts collected in each month, that would be GREAT!
John Amato, February 15, 2012:

Got it. I think we're saying the same thing, I should have been clearer in my example that we're only charging taxes on the taxable items. Which parts of the bookings are taxable is selectable for things like cleaning fees, and individually priced Guest Options. The pro-rating will be based on only the taxable components of the booking total.

Ok, so basically you're looking for a report that will show for a given period (selectable start & end dates), what taxable amounts (which is different from the actual calculated taxes) you have collected, pro-rated as we've described here for the payments that have been paid to you by the guests. And this is of course based on the "Booking Payments Made" box in the Booking Details page.

We'll get a first-stab at this out asap...

John
dlxhivac, February 29, 2012:

Any chance of getting this report out in near future? It is the end of the month and monthly filers need to file their taxes.
Thanks
John Amato, March 2, 2012:

I have a prototype working now, but it's really just a first stab at this. I suspect we will need to go through a couple iterations of this until it is really usable. I also think we may run into some rounding issues with the math involved.

We should have something for beta pilot testing in a day or two...

John
John Amato, March 3, 2012:

Tom (and everyone): We've put out a first-stab at this, called "Taxable Receipts". Give it a try and let us know your thoughts.

Thanks,

John
dlxhivac, March 3, 2012:

I will have to double check the numbers but at first glance it looks GREAT!
Thanks!!
(You can see why I was pushing for this. It is a lot of work for me to calculate manually each month.)

 
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