Quarterly filings coming up

This entry was submitted by one of our community members. The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding an unlikely case of hypnosis) and may not reflect the views of the Chamber.

If you are a quarterly filer with the Department of Revenue, and you have about two weeks left before the deadline, most people calculate this wrong when they do it themselves. "Just getting the correct numbers to use for your sales tax, or for your excise tax can be a challenge."

Some businesses use what’s called a point of sale, and this point-of-sale system is where you should be getting the reports to tell you how to file your quarterly returns.

Unfortunately most point-of-sale systems aren’t designed specifically for Washington, so you still have to do some manual work to try and get the correct numbers out of your point of sale with which to file your quarterly return. Again most people do this wrong.

Now if you’re in a service-based business it’s a little bit easier cause you should be able to just count the gross deposit into your bank account, but a lot of service businesses buy goods which they either resell or pass on the cost to the customer. This is when you should be looking to see if there’s a way you could do your current job less expensive lead to the client so that you could either charge less and get more business because you’re cheaper, or you can do it for less and make a bigger profit.

Filing your quarterly return also tells you how you’re doing in your estimations for the IRS, because at this point you should be paying in your self-employment tax deposits for 2017 first quarter as well. Don’t allow your current bookkeeper to ignore this. This is not simply a matter of putting a number in a box and moving onto the next task.

Even if you are using QuickBooks payroll, or some other payroll, you still need to make sure that your employment security and labor and industries are being filed and paid correctly as well. This is the time to review the tax rates and make sure the rates in your QuickBooks file are the same as your actual rates with your different state agencies.