Disclaimer: You should get tax advice from your accountant or tax adviser.  These instructions are for technical configuration of A2X.

In A2X, tax amounts come through as separate transaction lines in your payouts. This is great if you need all tax to be allocated to a single liability account and when you aren't running tax reports directly from your accounting system. But when you do run tax reports from your accounting system, like your Business Activity Statement (if you are registered for GST) for example, you need the accounting system to calculate the tax amounts based on tax rates provided in your accounting system.

To achieve this, tax rates need to be applied within the tax rate column in A2X.

That all sounds ok, right? GST on Sales etc, that part is pretty straight forward. But what about the tax that has already been separated out by A2X?

That's the bit that can seem a little tricky, but with this guide to follow, you'll find it's not.

You have a $110 sale in Shopify. The $110 is inclusive of GST.

In A2X, you see this:

Sale $100
Tax $10

So you still see the $110 but it is separated. What you need to do here is 'wrap' the sales and tax amounts back in together and then apply the applicable tax rate so that your accounting system calculates your GST for you, rather than it just being a separated amount.

To do that, we can use the following examples:

For simplicity, we will say we have the following in a payout from Shopify:
Sales including GST $110
Sales GST Free $50

Refunds including GST $55
Refunds GST Free $25

If we show that another way we would have:
Sales $150
GST $10

Refunds $75
GST $5

They both mean the same thing, they are just displayed differently.

In A2X, in the Accounts and Taxes mapping page for this particular account, you will see we have two sales lines in our income category.

Product Sales Excluding Tax $100
Product Sales Not Taxed $50
​

The GST has been separated out remember, so in the income category on the accounts and taxes page, we are only seeing the sales figures less any tax amounts.

The way we would map the lines in A2X, if you were registered for GST and all sales were occurring within Australia, would be as follows:

Now we move onto the refund lines from our payout example. 

Refunds Excluding Tax $50
Refunds Not Taxed $25

The GST has been separated out remember, so in the refunds category on the accounts and taxes page, we are only seeing the refunds figures less any tax amounts.

The way we would map the lines in A2X, if you were registered for GST and all sales were occurring within Australia, would be as follows:

Now for the Tax category. Basically, we mirror what we have done above for the applicable lines in the tax category. So for the TAX Online Store line line, this is the GST amount from our sales as per our payout example above.

These lines are, as taken from our payout example above:

Tax Online Store $10
Refunds Tax Online Store $5

The final step here, to ensure your GST is calculating correctly in either Xero or QuickBooks Online, is to wrap the tax back into the respective income account and apply the same tax rate.

The way we would map the tax lines in A2X would be as follows:

Please note: for simplicity we have used just a single sales account, single sales lines and a simple GST method in our example. You may have many different scenarios within your business, this guide is purely for A2X technical configuration assistance rather than tax guidance. What is described in this guide may not suit your business tax accounting needs, therefore, you should get tax advice from your accountant or tax adviser, these instructions are for technical configuration of A2X.

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