- [Instructor] In order to keep accurate sales tax records,
you need a careful system of record keeping.
Sales records will often be generated through your
point of sale software, but you'll probably want to keep
a record of total sales and sales taxes paid as well.
Let me show you what I mean.
So what we have here is a sales tax report for a single
retail location selling a service
and selling a product to the customer.
In this particular case, it's related to hair care products,
and then hair care services.
Now this is generated by a point of sale software,
and what it does is go through and list the number
of products sold, the amount of products that were sold,
the type of product, the cost in inventory,
the retail price, and then our gross margin.
And it's broken down in a variety of different ways,
based on the seller of the product or the maker
of the product, the type of product, etc.
So the idea is that it really just gives us a sense for what
we're selling and whether or not we're making money on that.
This type of information, very, very useful
and something that should be generated
by your point of sale software.
If your software doesn't generate something like this,
you might want to look at alternatives.
Now outside of the point of sale software, you're also
going to want to keep a record of what your sales are,
and what you paid in sales taxes on it.
In order to do that though, you're going to need to have
all this information aggregated.
It's great if you save this on a daily, weekly,
monthly basis, whatever, okay.
Your POS system puts this out every day, week, month.
That's nice, but if you're trying to understand whether
or not you've met your sales tax liabilities,
you really want to have this all aggregated somewhere,
so that you don't have to go back through PDFs
for however many days, weeks, months, you're looking for.
Now recording the information, recording your total sales
for the firm, doesn't have to be particularly difficult
or particularly time consuming.
All you really want to do is record your level of sales
every month, and then the level of sales tax paid.
So in this particular case, we're keeping a running total
every month, how much we're selling, and that ranges from
as little as $37,000 initially, to as much as $122,000
in January of 2018.
Now notice, our sales amounts are kept in column D.
In column C, we have the month
that this particular sale occurred.
More important than any of that though, is our records
on the sales taxes that we've paid, here in column B,
and the date that those sales taxes were paid in column A.
So this gives us a way to show, hey we've paid X amount
each month and this is the date that it was paid.
Now certainly your state government should give you some
sort of a sales tax receipt,
when you pay each of these amounts.
So if you paid $7800 as an example in January 2018,
when you file this on February 19th,
it'll spit out a receipt for you saying you paid $7800.
And that's great and you should on to the receipt,
but again it's nice to have this summary information
somewhere, so that you have it for your accountant
or bookkeeper, or so that you can refer to it if you're
unclear if you paid a particular month sales tax.
So this gives you a way to go through and summarize
and aggregate all of the information
that you might be interested in.
Notice, every month you're going to have
to pay your sales tax.
You must do that within 30 days of the close of the month.
If you don't, it's the likely the state government
will start fining you.
Now you're ready to keep track of your own sales
in preparation for meeting your sales tax requirements.