You might be asked to prepare end-of-year sales tax reports to help your business’s leaders make better decisions about next year or even because your business is writing off some sales and excise tax on end-of-year returns. No matter the reason, looking at your sales tax numbers will give you some good clues about what’s to come and how you can improve your sales tax management. After making sure that all sales tax filing periods were completed and your company did everything it was supposed to as a last double check with end-of-year reports, break out the amounts you filed into filing periods.
Looking at these numbers, business leaders will probably use them to judge the amount of tax liability for sales throughout the year to analyze sales and growth trends. As a sales tax manager, you can use this same information to figure out when you need extra help. Big lulls in sales tax filing amounts will tell you it was a slow month or you had sales tax holidays. While you can’t always plan for sales tax holidays far in advance since legislators can add them just a few days before they happen, knowing they’re coming can help you make better choices next year. When are times when you might need extra help for sales tax filing based on the numbers? Are there any things you remember struggling with specifically throughout the year?
Another thing to look at in your end-of-year sales tax reports is if you’ve hit a threshold for increased frequency, mandatory electronic filing, or even pre-payments. Pre-payments are the trickiest to manage because not only does it require strong cash flow policies, you need to be extra adept at quickly turning around sales tax data for filing so money isn’t caught up where it’s not needed. Be sure to check if your company has any new rules by which it needs to abide. Last, when you do your end-of-year reports, it’s a good time to review all of the sales tax laws that are applicable to your business. If you didn’t do a good job of it throughout the year, you might be behind the times. There’s no time like the new year to turn over a new leaf and make sure your filing reports are as correct as possible and fix bad filings.
