Hi there, I'm not a pro bookkeeper, but I do the books for my small business. I struggle with the way QBO manages the sales tax filings and wondered if anyone else here deals with it, if you have any good tips to help. I'm in Virginia, and VA dept of taxation handles the tax collection for all of the local tax authorities. As a result, I only need to make one sales tax payment each quarter. Couldn't be easier.

However, QBO (or at least the way I set it up) makes you do a tax filing for each tax agency separately. So I have to record that I've made three payments instead of the one. It also tends to default to monthly tax reporting when I do quarterly. You can change that, but I usually forget to.

I guess it's my own fault that I keep screwing up my tax filings, either underpaying or over paying because the QBO screen is wonky. I've complained to QBO about it, but they don't seem to want to handle a single tax authority. I guess I'll help myself by documenting the correct procedure in detail and make sure that I have it open on my computer and follow it to the letter each time.

Side note: I discovered that they changed the UI for sales tax a few months ago, but when I switched to it, it displayed really bizarre totals that didn't make any sense. The QBO rep showed me how to revert back to the old UI and the correct totals came back. So I'm still using the old UI!

Anybody else here struggle with this kind of thing? How can I make this less error-prone?