Sales Tax Return Preparation

Assembling the period’s transaction data by state and reporting jurisdiction, separating gross, taxable, exempt and non-taxable sales, identifying marketplace-facilitator amounts already collected by the platform, applying credits and refunds to the correct period, reconciling the resulting liability to the general ledger control account, and populating the state return form so it is ready for review. The prepared return and its supporting reconciliation are handed back; the business or its CPA reviews, approves and files.

No. Whether a sales tax obligation exists in a given state is a tax determination, and it belongs to the business’s CPA or tax adviser. Sales tax return preparation starts from the states the business or its adviser has already identified and registered in. If a state looks like it may need attention, that is raised as an exception for the adviser rather than answered.

The business or its CPA. Returns are prepared to a filing-ready state and handed back for review and submission under the filer’s own credentials. Accounstone does not submit returns to state portals, does not sign returns and does not authorise tax payments.

The states and jurisdictions included are confirmed during scoping against the business’s existing registrations, filing frequencies, systems and available records. Do not assume every state or local filing is automatically included; the agreed scope should list the specific returns and periods to be prepared.

Amounts a marketplace collected and remitted as the facilitator are identified from the platform settlement records and separated from the amounts the business is reporting itself, so the same revenue is not reported twice. Where the platform reporting is ambiguous, it is flagged in the exception notes rather than assumed in either direction.

No. Taxability and exemption positions are tax determinations and stay with the business’s CPA or tax adviser. Preparation works from the taxability treatment and exemption records the business already applies in its own systems. Where a transaction does not match any existing treatment, it is listed as an open item for the adviser to resolve.

No. Implementation, configuration and administration of third-party tax software is outside the scope of every Accounstone service. The recurring preparation work runs inside systems that are already configured, using the determinations those systems already produce.

The tax collected per the sales and billing systems is compared against the sales tax liability balance in the general ledger for the same period, and against what the prepared returns report. Differences are identified by cause — timing, a credit posted to the wrong period, an unmapped jurisdiction, a manual journal — and listed rather than cleared with a balancing entry.

Responding to a notice, assessment, appeal or audit is the business’s CPA or tax adviser’s work, and no part of it is in scope here. What preparation support can do is produce the underlying records for the period in question: the transaction detail, the reconciliation, the prepared return and the exception notes from the time it was prepared.

The list of states and registrations the business holds with their filing frequencies, transaction-level sales data by state and jurisdiction for the period, marketplace and payment-processor settlement reports, the exemption records already in use, the general ledger sales tax liability detail, and copies of recent filed returns so the opening position and prior treatment are visible.