I came across awkward situation when doing my last GST report. I run a charity and usually all sales are GST exempt due to the nature of the charity; however, I can claim back GST on all my expenses.
With COVID-19, about half of my transactions are now receipts for the day’s card transactions (where the sales are usually GST free) and the transaction has as a separate line item for the merchant fees and the GST associated with the merchant fee.
I have been recording these as a single transaction with 2 line items to aid reconciliation. A minus value used to apply the costing to the transaction.
The problem when it comes to reporting GST, this shows up in the total sales subject to GST and GST on sales can be a net negative value (see below). When entering the details into the Taxation Office’s online tax reporting system, you cannot enter a negative value into the system.
Is there a way around this other than by creating two separate entries for the one transaction, i.e separate Receipt and Payment transactions.
Entering them as a separate transaction is best and is consistent with each line item having a different payer / payee, one being a sale the other a purchase. That way when Manger supports linking “cash” sales / purchases to customer / supplier then this association will also be supported for these entries.
Edit
Entering them as a receipt from the donor (customer) and a payment to the card merchant (supplier) also means the tax summary and GST calculation worksheet will classify the sales and purchases as you want.
Yes, wouldn’t linking of entries, especially if they can roll up into a consolidated entry and be expanded as needed to view the detail be a great feature.
The best solution (i.e. in that it creates a less messy set of figures); however, the most accurate way of doing it I guess would be to process the net amount as income and then do a journal entry to include the charge which is offset by a corresponding income figure of the same amount.
The “worksheet” is just that a worksheet - it is not absolute, nor final.
Therefore, if required, you can make amending entries (transfers) upon the worksheet before entering the data into the online reporting system.
I would continue with the single entry and two lines.
