Tracking Sales/Use Tax within Expense

[dengberg]

How are companies tracking the sales/use tax for expenses submitted for reimbursement?  We are trying to determine the most efficient way to track tax for reimbursable expenses within Concur Expense, that is only applicable for a few of our locations.

[Munari_alEXPert]

dear @dengberg 

could you please provide more details on your question?

Because from my side at the moment the answer would be that to track taxes or specific expenses which are relevant for taxes, are possible to get them via a Cognos reporting which you can filter by location/country.

[dengberg]

As of now, the reporting through Cognos wouldn't help us because we don't capture the sales tax piece at all in expense and our use tax is manually monitored by us sending the transactions that didn't have tax on them to our tax department for review.  However, I do like the idea of adding the sales tax field especially since we are about to roll out a corporate card program. 

[JessicaL]

I agree that using a report would be a good way to track use taxes. We use Concur for our Purchasing Card program and during implementation, added two custom fields:

Was Sales Tax Collected? Yes/No

Amount of Sales Tax - which was required if "Yes" was chosen.

Since we had a credit card feed into Concur, the "Amount of Sales Tax" would fill in automatically for larger vendors that utilized Level 3 data. We found that with many of our vendors, this field would pre-populate. When the month-end journal entry had to be done, we would review the "No" transactions to see if sales tax should have been collected and then, we would pay that amount to the appropriate state. It really worked well for our program.

[dengberg]

We are still in the process of rolling out a corporate card/p-card program but I really like the idea of creating the additional fields.  With those fields though, do they put the gross or the net in for the transaction total?

[RuthRector]

Jessica, we too have a custom field where the user enters the sales tax collected.  The complaint we are hearing from our tax group is that the description and location of purchase fields are not very helpful.  Business Purpose is where the description of the transaction appears and data input by users is not helpful - this one we can train to.  The location of purchase fills in with extra information such as phone number and is difficult to determine the city/state.  Does your group do their review in the application or from a report?  

[JessicaL]

For our build, we have the gross in the transaction total.