Sales tax corresponds with the number of retail sales your company does during the filing period. The more sales you have, the more sales tax you have to manage. Of course, filing frequency increases with higher sales amounts but once you hit a threshold amount, the number of times you need to file in the year stays the same. Just because it’s Black Friday doesn’t mean you need to file multiple times. So is there a busy season for sales tax? It depends. If your sales tax filing process is overloaded during the holiday shopping season because it takes you more than an hour or two to complete sales tax, the holiday shopping season might mean a lot of time spent on sales tax filing.
If there are lots of things that need to be guided through the sales tax process, it could easily take a day. Combine that with all the other accounting tasks that end-of-year requires and the added stress of doing your own holiday shopping—your life can quickly feel like a mess at the holidays from every angle. As things start to get busier during the holidays, take a moment or two to track how much time you’re actually spending on different tasks for a week or two. Keep a notepad on your desk and write down when you start an activity and when you finish it. Tally up how much time you spend on different tasks and look at how you’re spending your time.
You can give yourself a good idea of where you need to improve your accounting and finance processes to streamline your work better. Are you spending hours correcting information sales reps should get right? Are you manually overriding the same errors period to period? Finding these sources that suck up the most time is the first step to simplifying your sales tax management and filing processes. If you don’t know where you’re spending time inefficiently, you don’t know how to improve it. If you’ve been looking for the right time to convince the decision-makers in your business that you need better resources to help you control sales tax filing, the holidays are a good time to show why you need to upgrade your systems. You can take your list of tasks with how much time you’ve spent with your boss to make an argument for a better way of doing tasks.
We offer free evaluations of our products that take all your data, verify it, and help you complete filing in an hour or less. What’s even better is we can get you up and running with our software in a matter of moments so if you’re drowning in end-of-year tasks and holiday sales tax, contact us for a lifeline.
