Well, it's that time of the year/quarter/month again - time to file those sales tax reports with your local jurisdictions.
I think I can speak for all Shopify merchants when I say YUCK!
Gathering all of your sales data and breaking it down by state, county, or city can be very time-consuming and complicated. But perhaps surprisingly, there aren't a lot of tools to help merchants through the process.
In fact, TaxJar seems to be the defacto standard for Shopify merchants. But why? Between the lukewarm reviews and high cost, you'd think there'd be a better option?
Well, as a matter of fact, there is.
You guessed it, Report Toaster can help you file your taxes! At this point, you have to be asking yourself if there's anything that Report Toaster can't do.
Report Toaster Tax Reports
Recently, we've introduced a new group of reports created specifically to help merchants file their sales taxes.
Taxes by Jurisdiction
The new Taxes by Jurisdiction report provides an accounting of all sales and taxes withheld by jurisdiction:
Here's a little primer to help understand what all of the data means:
Title - The name of the tax jurisdiction for which tax was withheld.
Rate - The tax rate for that particular jurisdiction.
Order Tax Lines - The number of taxable orders for that jurisdiction.
Price - The amount of tax withheld.
Net Sales - The taxable sales for the jurisdiction. Note that many tax authorities will ask for the gross sales (which to them means the amount collected, not including taxes). This is equivalent to the Net Sales field in Shopify.
Shipping - The amount charged for shipping on taxable sales. Some tax jurisdictions require tax to be collected on shipping charges. In this case, the Net Sales and Shipping columns would need to be added together to represent all taxable sales.
This report defaults to run for the previous month, but it can be changed to run for any time period (such as last quarter, last year, etc).
Monthly Taxable Sales
The Monthly Taxable Sales report provides an aggregate view of all taxable sales, by month, for the year.
This report contains most of the same elements as the jurisdiction report, but is most useful when reporting higher-level taxable sales numbers to states for which you have nexus.
Refer to this support article to understand how this report can be filtered to run for a particular state or a different period of time.
Monthly Non-Taxable Sales
The Monthly Non-Taxable Sales report provides an aggregate view of all non-taxable sales, by month, for the year.
This report is the same as the Monthly Taxable Sales Report, except instead it includes sales that were NOT taxed. Some jurisdictions require non-taxed sales to be reported, so that's when this report would come in handy.
Tax Lines
The Tax Lines report lists the tax details for each order.
This report includes most of the same information as the Tax by Jurisdiction report, just at a more granular level. This report is intended as a tool to be used when researching any sales tax inquiries.
What about TaxJar?
A tool like TaxJar doesn't get to be so popular without doing something right. After all, providing the ability for taxes to be filed automatically can save merchants a lot of time and headaches.
But what about merchants that file manually using TaxJar's reports?
This excerpt from their Shopify app store listing summarizes it best:
Note the paragraph in the red box. As they explain, they use data provided directly from Shopify to file these reports.
However, this is the exact same data used by Report Toaster! So if you're using TaxJar and NOT using it for automatic filing, you are likely overpaying. See their price list below.
In most cases, Report Toaster will be priced 2 to 20 times less for a comparable plan. That's right, you can save money by using Report Toaster! (not to mention we do a LOT more than just tax reporting).
Finally, at Report Toaster, we pride ourselves on customer service and our 5-star rating. If you check out TaxJar's reviews, I think you can see where the rest of this blog post is going.
Replacing TaxJar: A Short Case Study
We have helped many of our merchants create tax filing reports. But one specific customer asked if they could use Report Toaster to directly replace TaxJar.
So we decided to take the Pepsi Challenge and find out!
First, it should be noted that this particular merchant was using TaxJar simply to report the tax information, not for automatic filing. The TaxJar reports were accessed monthly to manually enter the proper amounts into the state's tax filing website. Our thoughts were that if we could prove that the Report Toaster reports matched the TaxJar reports, we could indeed be used as a replacement. So we went to work and started comparing our monthly tax reports to those from TaxJar.
What we found was a bit surprising. The Report Toaster reports were actually MORE accurate!
How, you ask? TaxJar doesn't actually sync Shopify orders in real-time like Report Toaster does. This was causing some orders from the month of February to actually be reported in March, some in March to be reported in April, etc.
Once we proved Report Toaster's accuracy, the next step was to deliver the information. We used our Scheduled Reports feature to email the reports directly to the merchant on a monthly basis at tax-filing time. This automation saves the merchant time and makes the information available exactly when it's needed.
So let's recap this little case study.
More accurate tax reporting
Time saved by automating the process
Saved $20/month by replacing TaxJar
Perhaps most important of all, we have another happy Report Toaster customer.
Let Us Help
So what are you waiting for? If you're using Shopify and having to manually file taxes, why not have Report Toaster do the hard part for you?
Our support team is always available to help get everything setup for you. We can always be reached via Email, Knowledge Base, or the Live Chat in our app.
That's all for now. We will write again soon with more new features from Report Toaster.