Taxes and Invoices with CRM and QBO

This is looking to clarify first how taxes in CRM and QBO are working and second how to resolve the commonly experienced errors/issues you may be experiencing when pushing invoices to QBO from CRM. Please take the time to review carefully, especially the troubleshooting section at the conclusion.

Taxes Overview

Federal, provincial and harmonized taxes (where applicable) are calculated in CRM and calculated again in QBO. It is expected on synch that these two calculations will match. In both CRM and QBO the total tax due on an invoice is separated out from the rest of the invoice aka you see the total tax amount due on an invoice, not the tax due per line. In CRM all applicable taxes are compressed into one total tax amount due – QBO may break these amounts out by individual taxes.

In CRM every invoice line item is assigned a tax code that relates to a tax code in QBO. This tax code tells QBO what taxes and rates to apply to the item. For example should an item be taxable by GST it might have a tax code like “GST” – it would be expected that in QBO a tax rate named “GST” would exist and QBO will use this rate for its tax calculations. If the rate does not exist with that name, or has a different rate amount then CRM an error will happen on sync.

Tourism Taxes

While tourism taxes are indeed taxes from a technical perspective they are best understood as not being taxes but regular products. None of the previous rules or behaviours regarding taxes apply to tourism taxes. Instead both CRM and QBO treat Tourism Taxes as regular products or line items. There is a charge for some service (in this case a tax) and that service may be subject to additional taxes. As such tourism taxes will be displayed in both CRM and QBO as line items and will not show as “tax” amounts due on related areas of the invoice.

Tourism taxes work this way because (1) they are the only taxes that may also be taxable and (2) QBO does not have any concept or handling of taxes at this level – there are no facilities for sales tax reports or remittances for these types of taxes.

Taxes Defined in QBO

Due to limitations in QBO it is recommended that whenever possible you use the built in (to QBO) tax rates and not custom taxes. Custom taxes will work for syncing invoices from CRM to QBO but custom taxes setup in QBO may have issues with what is displayed on invoices and producing sales tax reports and proper calculation of ITCs. These are all QBO issues, nothing to do with CRM and are being worked on by Intuit. Until these issues are resolved by Intuit we recommend that unless you are using custom taxes imported from Enterprise that Custom taxes in QBO should be avoided unless they cannot be avoided – for example if the built in tax rates for the tax in QBO is not correct.

Tax Mappings

The tax code that will be applied in QBO can be seen in CRM by opening the invoice, and the invoice line item and looking at the field marked “Sales Tax Code Ref”. The value for this field is pulled from the name of the tax in CRM. If this name does not match the name in your QBO then the tax cannot be mapped and the invoice cannot be synced. In this case the tax would need to be added to QBO or the tax name in CRM should be adjusted to match your tax name in QBO.

In general, if the tax is for your jurisdiction then the name in CRM should be changed to match the tax name in your QB. If the tax is for somewhere outside your jurisdiction (for example a tax on an IO invoice) then likely the tax will need to be created in your QBO. For issues with tax mapping between CRM and QBO please open support tickets at [email protected] Reporting Issues

In some cases you may need to open support tickets for resolutions. When opening tickets for invoice related issues please indicate all of the following:

  1. The name of the invoice
  2. The customer for the invoice
  3. The reservation or order# for the invoice
  4. Exactly what error or issue you are having
  5. What troubleshooting steps you have taken to try and resolve the issue.