CPA and Bookkeeping Plano Alternative.The code you elected at setup.

Company setup asks for a tax rate or a tax agency and then never asks again. Whatever was clicked becomes the default on every new item, every new invoice, every new location that was not given a mind of its own. Calling it an election is fair. Someone chose, even if that person was rushed and the choice was "same as my other company."

We read that field on purpose during intake. It is a strange thing to skip and then spend hours on the bank feed. The feed cannot outvote the code. If you have more than one location, each location's election has to be read, because a warehouse in one city and a counter in another are not a single election wearing two hats.

Public school taxes are not this election. They live on property notices, which the school page separates from the receipt. If a setup screen offered you a school district and you picked one, that pick may matter for a business personal property rendition's geography. It does not add a line to sales tax. Mixing those screens is a common way to "elect" a story the receipt cannot tell.

Change the election today and tomorrow's invoices improve. The invoices already issued keep the code they were born with. Customers were charged what they were charged. You generally do not get to rewind a customer's ticket because your default was clumsy. What you can rewind is your own books, by reclassing tax and sales so the holding accounts match what was actually collected, and by dealing honestly with anything that should have been collected and was not.

Those are different sins. Over-collecting and calling it sales is a classification repair. Under-collecting is a hole, and the hole may belong on a return as tax you still owe even though you never put it in the drawer. We will not blur them to make the journal entry prettier. You need to know which one you are funding.

A note in the month file, in plain words, should say when the election changed and who changed it. Future you, and future us, will not remember. The software's audit log is a bonus if it exists and is not a substitute for a sentence a human can read.

If three people can edit items, three people can elect a new code by accident. We would rather the code live with one role, the way payday approvals should live with one role. That is ordinary internal control, not a lecture. A Saturday hire trying to be helpful is how neighbor rates reappear six months after you cleaned them out.

We set payday up so the provider, not a shared spreadsheet, is where wages are computed. The same instinct applies here. The invoice screen, not a side list in someone's head, should be where the code lives. If your industry needs exemption certificates for some customers, those certificates are their own election per customer, and a missing certificate is not something we paper over with a friendlier rate.

Bring a screenshot of the tax code list, or export it. We can read a list faster than we can read a year of invoices, and the list tells us what the file is capable of charging even before we see what it did charge.

Write the date of the change in the month file in a sentence a person can read. The software's log is a bonus when it exists. It is a poor memory when a new computer arrives and the log does not come with it. Future you, and future us, will not remember which Tuesday the neighbor rate finally left the items. The sentence will.