21 Nov 2024 | Windward Software
Preparing for the GST Holiday in Canada
This Windward Webinar helps you get ready to manage inventory taxes for the upcoming GST holiday in Canada. Explore three strategies to manage the temporary tax exemption on certain products within System Five. Learn how to adjust tax settings on inventory items and how to track these changes for future reference.
- Bria, the moderator, introduced Scott, who led the discussion on preparing for Canada's upcoming GST holiday.
- Scott explained that the Canadian government declared a GST or HST exemption on certain products from December 15th to February 15th.
- Three strategies were presented to manage the tax exemption:
- Manually toggling tax exemption on specific product lines at the point of sale.
- Editing tax settings on inventory items in advance.
- Using the design inventory report to adjust tax settings on a batch of items.
- Scott demonstrated how to manually toggle tax exemption at the point of sale.
- For strategy two, he suggested using a lookup word to track items with adjusted tax settings. He demonstrated how to toggle tax settings for a product and add a lookup word.
- A question was asked about the effect of removing tax from an item on open work orders or invoices. Scott explained that it would not affect existing orders unless they were edited.
- The third strategy involved using the design inventory report to adjust tax settings on a batch of items. Scott demonstrated how to design a report and adjust tax settings on all items included in the report.
- A question was asked about removing an item from the report. Scott explained that this was not possible but suggested drilling into items on the report and manually adjusting them.
- Scott also explained how to use the lookup word to filter products on the design inventory report.
- Questions were raised about automatically adjusting taxes for a specific date range and editing parts in general. Scott explained that the system did not have features for these specific ne
0:03
Hi, everyone.
0:04
My name is Bria, and I'll be your moderator for today's session.
0:07
Thanks so much for joining today.
0:09
We're going to be discussing how to prepare for Canada's upcoming GST holiday.
0:12
As we go along, feel free to send in any questions, and I'll pass those along to Scott.
0:16
But without further ado, I'll pass this presentation over to Scott.
0:21
Thanks, Bria.
0:22
And thank you for coming, everyone.
0:25
So we'll dive right into how to best manage the taxes on your inventory and at your point sale and in light of this recent rebate.
0:39
We're going to show you three different strategies today.
0:44
One that's designed as sort of if you just catch this at the last minute and the other two are a little more proactive.
0:53
So the first thing we're going to start with is what if you know there's a product that you're selling that this applies to and just in case anyone has come to the webinar and know the whole situation.
1:04
Basically the government of Canada has said there'll be no GST or HST on certain products for the timeframe of December 15th to February 15th, so you won't need to collect it or remit it.
1:17
But what if you come across one of these products at the point of sale and you need to adjust it just on that sale?
1:24
So this is a way you can quickly deal with that problem as it occurs, but not a very proactive way.
1:31
So if I am just running a new sale here, also since our friend Justin Trudeau has made this a mandate, which is a little bit more difficult for all of us than it is for the consumer not paying the taxes, I've decided to make a Justin Trudeau action figure that we sell.
2:09
And as it's a toy, it's going to be applicable to this tax rebate.
2:12
So suppose that I have this product on a line, and I realize that this needs to be tax exempt.
2:21
I can click here on the taxes line, and I can double click there, or, sorry, I can't double click there, I can hit the taxes here with the line highlighted, and I can toggle the GST on and off, just like that.
2:37
So if you have an invoice for a customer, and it has a mixture of product, and there's just one line that this applies to, and you haven't had the chance to address the taxes on the products ahead of time, this is a way to catch it and just adjust it right on the sale.
2:53
And that won't affect the product long term, it won't affect the customer long term, it simply toggles and untoggles the taxes.
3:01
And you can see on the bottom of the invoice, as I do that, the GST is set to zero.
3:08
So that's our first step.
3:11
Let's tender that out.
3:13
And that, again, we demonstrate that specifically for those products that you don't make an adjustment to in advance.
3:26
Now, there's a couple approaches to this that are going to be probably more beneficial.
3:36
Editing the taxes on the inventory items in question ahead of time.
3:40
And again, this is fairly simple, but the hard part about it is finding all those items.
3:46
And of course, whatever you turn the taxes off now, you're gonna have to go back and re-address in February.
3:53
So I have a couple suggestions on how you might track that, but the first part is just kind of a bit of work.
4:00
So if I open an inventory item, then in every item, if you scroll over here, or scroll down here, there's a taxes tab.
4:32
And I can go here and toggle and untoggle the taxes.
4:37
So, where that is quite easy and simple to do and then that tax will stay off until you come back and toggle it on, you have to remember to do that to all the products in question.
4:49
And so, what might be helpful once you find the product, of course, toggle the taxes as needed.
4:56
Then you might want to set some sort of flag on the product so that you can run a report later to untoggle it or add the tax back in.
5:05
My suggestion for that is gonna be to use what we call a lookup word.
5:09
So under the comments section of the item, under these various types of comments, you could put, you can go to the lookup words tab and you could create yourself a lookup word.
5:22
So I'm just gonna go, I'll call it GST rebate down here and hit add and now that item is flagged.
5:33
And this will allow me to filter certain reports, quite a few reports actually, buy this flag.
5:40
So only tell me the sales of the items that have this.
5:44
Only change the taxes on the items that have this.
5:47
This gives you an additional flag for tracking the products you need to affect so that you can readjust them in February.
5:58
And it may help later on the reporting, although we don't know what the reporting's gonna look like just yet.
6:04
I do see we have a question here, so I'll just pause.
6:08
Thanks for the question, Tamara.
6:10
I have a question.
6:11
When you take the tax off from the item, what does it do to all the open work orders or other invoices the system has previously had with this tax on it?
6:22
Will it break any of the linkage?
6:25
So no, and even if you opened, say, a work order, Tamara, it wouldn't adjust the taxes on that line unless you removed the line and added it back on.
6:39
So it'll leave everything else static that has already happened unless you go back and edit it.
6:46
Does that answer your question?
6:56
Thank you, Tamara, that's a good question.
7:02
So of course the challenge to this approach that I'm showing you is that you have to go in and out of potentially quite a large number of items.
7:10
So what we're gonna show you next is how you can affect a batch of items.
7:14
And of course the tricky part about that is how do you figure out what should be in this batch of items.
7:22
And there might not be a good way.
7:24
But what you can do as you go along is use that lookup word to create this batch so that in February you've got a way to turn it all off together.
7:34
I'll show you what I mean.
7:37
So the third approach we're gonna use here is useful for editing the taxes on items.
7:44
It's useful for other things as well.
7:47
by category, by supplier, or brand.
7:50
So the trick to this approach is you're just building a report and you need a way to filter the appropriate product on the report because the report will change the taxes on everything on the report.
8:03
So if it's all one supplier, all one category, or all one brand, this will make it easy.
8:09
But as it might be a mixture, this may not be a viable approach.
8:13
Just depends how you're set up.
8:15
Of course, no one really saw this coming.
8:21
So the tool we're going to talk about next, I may take just a little bit more time to talk about because of all the other handy ways you can use it.
8:31
So this is an inventory report, and if you go under inventory reports right here, it's the design inventory report.
8:42
And one of the cool things about this design inventory report is if you design a report in here with all your own columns on it, all your own data on it, whatever you need.
8:50
It's very customizable.
8:52
Then you can save that and it'll be available here under print inventory reports later.
8:58
So what we could do is create a design inventory report now and then leave it saved here for February.
9:07
So I'm going to open up the design inventory reports and just kind of show you around this tool if it's new to you.
9:20
So this report is a lot like it sounds, in that it lets you design your own inventory report.
9:29
I'm gonna go through it, since we've got some time, from the left all the way over to these columns over here.
9:38
And we'll touch on the lookup words and how this report can interact with that lookup word you saw me use.
9:44
So first, let's suppose I have a category that I wanna remove the taxes for for this rebate.
9:50
I'm going to use a subcategory, so I'm going to pick category and hit subcategory and I'm going to go into my household goods and I think we'll use the books category for this example or maybe we'll do the clothing actually.
10:06
So if I go to clothing, then it's going to filter everything that's in category 405 and that's what it'll be on my report.
10:15
Alternatively, I could do a range of categories or a main category or my entire stock, but those don't apply in our scenario.
10:24
If all your product that this applies to is from one supplier or from one brand, then you could turn off this category filter and use these instead.
10:38
that might be a viable option.
10:43
And Andrew, I do see a question from you there.
10:46
Can I get a copy of this after the presentation?
10:50
Yes, it's stored on our website.
10:52
Takes a little time to upload to the website, but all the webinars are there.
10:56
It's a great resource, actually.
10:57
There's lots of recorded webinars there.
11:01
There's a bunch of other custom filters here.
11:04
So for example, maybe it's the case that everything in a certain part number range this applies to, or everything with a certain description this applies to, and maybe that would help you filter this in a meaningful way as well, it's potential.
11:22
Here in the options tab, there are a lot of really specific things that can be used in lots of scenarios that we won't go through today, but if you look at all those different toggles and options, it can be very handy to build the kind of report that you might not be finding elsewhere in system five.
11:40
One of the key concepts of what we're gonna do today is choosing the information you need to know that the correct products are being affected.
11:50
You do that by picking from the available columns here on the columns tab.
11:55
I always recommend pick category, pick part number, pick description, supplier.
12:04
These are some basics.
12:08
And I'm gonna scroll down a little bit.
12:09
You can see there's quite a few different columns I can choose.
12:13
so I'm gonna put the cost on.
12:16
And I'll scroll down a little further to where the pricing is, which is down here.
12:22
And I can put the pricing on.
12:24
And just since we're in here, I'm gonna scroll down further.
12:28
Here you can see the taxes.
12:30
Now in my tax setup, tax one and tax two are the two that are gonna come into play.
12:35
So I'm gonna put them on there so I can see what the tax settings are on the items on my report.
12:42
Other things that are useful, This is a little off topic, but here you can do things that report on your sales, the age of your inventory, which is going to be quite handy, sales for date range, which lets you configure your own date ranges, and things like how much have I purchased in a date range.
13:02
So lots of things you can do with this report, can be quite helpful.
13:08
With my columns selected, I'm going to just hit view.
13:14
This lookup words will come back to, and this dates applies if you use a date-based filter on here.
13:22
So I'm just gonna hit view, and that's gonna bring up all the product on my report.
13:28
And so this is all the blue jeans.
13:30
Not sure if these blue jeans would actually, this would apply to the blue jeans.
13:35
But here on this report, what you wanna focus on is, do I have the correct product, which I wanted to toggle to be taxable, or untaxable on the report and you want to also make sure that you don't have anything on here that you don't want to affect because when I do this routine it's going to hit everything on here so really you probably need to scroll up and down through it and I can see how it's very probable that this approach may not be that easy to just do on a category for example and you can see here the two taxes in my case the GSD is taxed too and you can see from my practice here that it's turned off.
14:14
So what I'm gonna show you is how to toggle that on everything on this report.
14:20
And the tool I'm about to show you is quite helpful in a number of ways, quite powerful in that it changes many products at one time.
14:29
So it's not something you wanna be liberal about, it's something you wanna be more conservative about.
14:36
To change the tax settings on the product that's on my report, you wanna go over here to the report tab now.
14:48
And here, you'll see this toggle, adjust inventory that's included in this report.
14:54
So first, I'm gonna say this a few times because it can really mess you around.
15:03
Make sure the correct product is on the report before you proceed.
15:07
You want only to affect the things on the report.
15:10
And remember that everything on the report will be affected.
15:14
So when you click this, my suggestion is you double check with yourself.
15:18
Did I read that report, even if it's long, and make sure I wanted to affect everything on the report?
15:25
When I toggle this button on, you'll see the pricing come up on the screen, and below you'll see the taxes.
15:36
So a few things you can do on this report is adjust pricing on everything on the report, which can be quite handy if you wanna add a discount, level to certain things, or put some things on sale.
15:49
You can also set the dates of a sale.
15:53
But what we're gonna use it for today is to toggle the GST.
15:57
So in my example, I think the GST was off.
16:01
So I'm gonna turn it back on and you can see that when I interact with this it turns yellow.
16:06
Yellow means it knows that you're gonna make a change.
16:14
I see some questions there.
16:15
I'll come back to you in a minute.
16:18
So I'm gonna do that and then I'm gonna hit okay.
16:22
And it's gonna ask you this question.
16:25
Do you wanna update the master default item?
16:27
And the master default item controls how new product is created.
16:32
So in a scenario like this, you definitely wanna hit no.
16:36
But in other scenarios, that can be helpful.
16:39
This case, we don't wanna make a permanent change to how new product is created.
16:43
Because that product might be applicable, like this rebate may apply and it may not.
16:46
So I would say no.
16:49
So now it's ready to make the change, And it's going to do that as soon as I hit the view button here.
16:56
When I hit the view button, I'll get this message, which is basically saying, the thing you keep hearing me repeating, you've selected to adjust price codes, in our case, tax price codes, and you will not be able to undo these changes, or rather, you'd have to do this again to undo them.
17:13
So it's kind of like a data load in that it's going to make a bunch of changes at once.
17:16
You just want to be really sure and careful how you do this.
17:21
Then you hit yes to proceed.
17:23
And what it does is it builds the report, and as it builds the report, it makes the changes.
17:30
So you'll notice here that, wait, Scott, you had these taxes off before, and now they're still off.
17:36
So because of the way it does this, hit view twice and say yes to this.
17:44
And you'll see the result right there.
17:48
Now just to review that again, because now my taxes are on.
17:52
Let's say I wanna make, it's December 14th and I wanna make sure my taxes are off.
17:57
Same products, I would go back to report.
18:01
I'm gonna toggle that again so it pops up.
18:04
I'll turn the GST off there.
18:08
Hit okay.
18:11
Hit no.
18:14
Hit view.
18:16
Hit yes, and like I said, the first time, although it's made the change, it doesn't show it on screen.
18:24
If I view it a second time and hit yes, I'm back to having the taxes off on those items.
18:32
So this is a way to do a lot of products quickly if they are somehow in the same category, from the same vendor, have the same brand.
18:41
And another thing you can do with this report, we're just gonna look at after I do a couple questions with you here, is how can I use lookup words?
18:49
Because when you first go through this in the early part of December, it's probably gonna be a bit painstaking to mark all the product.
18:57
This approach I'm showing you may not really work that well.
19:00
But once you have them all flagged with a lookup word, we can run a report that filters by that lookup word.
19:10
So I've got a few questions here.
19:23
So Tamara, I'm gonna probably go through that again.
19:26
Oh, I think you saw it.
19:32
And Lori, unfortunately, no, you can't just remove an item from this report.
19:39
Now what you can do on this report, though, is drill in.
19:44
So let's say there was just, it was everything, but there was five lines on here that you didn't want to affect.
19:49
You could run the report, then drill into the five items, like I'm doing here, and toggle that particular one right there.
20:01
So if you've got a category that's mostly tax exempt, you probably could run it on the whole category and then go through and untoggle the ones that it doesn't apply to manually.
20:19
Oh, this is a good question as well, Lori.
20:21
Is there a report to see all items that currently have GST in your system?
20:26
I would use this same report, but instead of the filter I used, which was this category, I'd run it on everything.
20:34
So that's a good example.
20:36
So if I go back to the report tab and I'll untick this, and I'll try some different filters.
20:42
So I'll go to category, I'll run it on everything.
20:46
I think, you know, I can use these same columns because the taxes are in those columns.
20:52
In my case, tax one is PSD, tax two is GST.
20:56
and you need to check your tax settings in the setup wizard, which we'll look at in a moment, to know which is which.
21:02
And then you just view that.
21:05
Just a note on that, on a large data set with large numbers of products, that can take a little time to run that.
21:12
But here you can see what's taxable and non-taxable.
21:16
And you can even sort by the column headers.
21:19
Or you can also right click and export that to Excel and do some more filtering there.
21:32
So there's a couple things we'll touch on in the Setup Wizard here to answer some of the questions.
21:36
So I've got a good question here, how do you give user access to adjust inventory included on this report and what is the user setting surrounding that?
21:50
I feel like I should have seen that one come in but I didn't so we're going to go have a peek.
21:56
I'll go to the Setup Wizard and I'm pretty sure it is a user setting and George might you have to know good so we'll turn it off for him.
22:12
I'm pretty certain that it would be under the inventory tab and I am pretty sure it's going to be these items down here but I think actually it's for me to test this I think I probably got to go to different user when I'm logged in as me and what we'll do is we'll try turning them off and I'll go try again.
22:51
It's probably part load and it's probably these ones here.
23:02
Let me just look at the other inventory reports.
23:09
This would probably turn that report off entirely right here.
23:24
Let's try that.
23:48
Didn't get it.
24:06
So I apologize, I don't know the answer to that question, which user setting controls this.
24:13
Just to avoid spinning everyone's wheels, I'll just have to skip by that in this conversation.
24:18
I have a few other questions here that I think I can address.
24:26
Let me just see where I'm at.
24:32
Can you use the sale date range to turn the taxes on and off?
24:35
No, unfortunately, Jason, you cannot, although that would be a good idea to address a problem like this.
24:41
I don't think we've had a problem exactly like this before.
24:50
You could, Arno, that's a good question.
24:53
Arno's asking, can we set up a new GST rate of 0% for the applicable dates?
25:00
Well, you could edit your tax settings, but it would affect the entire system.
25:04
And that's unlikely to be suitable.
25:07
So I don't think there's really a way around having to edit every item here.
25:18
And of course, there's another question here.
25:21
Is there a way to shut off the taxes for a date range for a specific and have it turned back on?
25:28
No, I'm afraid that there isn't.
25:29
I don't think that we've had this sort of issue brought to Windward before, and it was kind of sprung on everyone, so we don't have a method to do that, I'm afraid.
25:46
And for returns, for returns I would suggest if the item is not, if the rebate applies, use the line item approach that we did at the beginning.
26:02
This is a good question.
26:05
We're considering exporting a report to Excel, then deleting the unnecessary lines, then re-importing it via a part load with the added lookup word, So that helps us filter the product.
26:17
I do agree that's a good approach, Erika.
26:18
I think that's a great way to do it.
26:20
The reason I'm not showing the data load today is just not everyone has the technical skills for the data load, and I wanted to give people a sort of a more viable option if they don't have that skill set.
26:30
But a data load would do this as well.
26:32
My only caution with the data load, make sure you do a backup before that data load.
26:39
Make sure you do a backup before that data load, Meaning get everyone out, load the file in, double check your results before you let anyone back in.
26:58
And the way to edit parts in general, Tamra, is you gotta have a filter of some kind.
27:05
And oh, I see Arno, you're a toy store.
27:07
So Arno, this may actually affect everything in your inventory in your case.
27:11
So in which case, yeah, you could use all, you could turn the taxes off in your instance.
27:16
So I will show you that, but I have to caution you to be very careful with what I'm about to show you.
27:22
And it probably doesn't apply to everyone here in a way.
27:28
So actually, first what I'll show you is how we can use that same report.
27:44
So I'll do this by subcategory again, and we'll pick the same columns.
28:01
And just a note, if you were to use the data load approach, definitely grab those two columns.
28:05
You're gonna need them.
28:07
Those are the key matching metrics for a data load.
28:14
And I'll just grab the taxes, maybe the price.
28:26
So let's suppose that I want to filter this report not only by the category, but by a lookup word.
28:36
So in fact, you know what I'll do?
28:37
I'm gonna take out this.
28:38
I'm gonna do it on all my inventory, but I'm gonna go to this lookup words tab here.
28:44
Let's suppose that I put this lookup word on all the items that the rebate applies to.
28:50
Well, here's the lookup word I created earlier in the presentation.
28:54
So if I put that over there and I tick this, must have all the lookup words, so that one.
29:01
And down here on the bottom, I say include by lookup word.
29:04
So if I do that, I think what you'll see is just our friend JT shows up.
29:11
So if you add the lookup word But as you go the first time around, it'll be easy to use the lookup word as a filter to add the taxes back in in February.
29:21
You can also use this report to, if you look at the bottom, add a lookup word to everything on the report.
29:27
So say you had a category you wanted to affect by a lookup word, and there's a number of reasons you might wanna do something like this.
29:36
You can say, well, add a lookup word to everything on my report.
29:40
And then run the report, and it'll add it.
29:44
you can exclude by lookup word on the report.
29:55
So there are of course tax settings back in the setup wizard that can be controlled by date under your taxes.
30:07
But my advice to you is do not go into this tax area without someone's help.
30:12
Because if you can mess things up in here pretty easily that will cause you quite a bit of grief.
30:17
So although I'm gonna show you, I would suggest that if you're gonna come in here, So say it applies that you may want assistance from customer care and don't ever edit the red line because that will affect historical invoices.
30:35
Always add a new line.
30:37
So to answer a question we had earlier, could I put in a date here?
30:42
Yes, you can put, I can start a new line.
30:44
It'll default to the current date.
30:47
Then I could say zero for that date and then I had to come back after in February and add another line and turn the taxes back on.
30:59
And that would work, but that would apply to all of your inventory that that tax applies to.
31:05
It's not really what I'd recommend.
31:06
I'd recommend one of the three approaches we talked about today.
31:09
Maybe using lookup words to filter things so that you have a better list for the follow-up.
31:17
The other benefit to the lookup words is that The lookup words can be used to filter sales reports and inventory sales reports, and although we don't know what this looks like yet, that may help you in the reporting piece when the government comes asking questions about the taxes.
31:36
I'm thinking we're gonna need to have a follow-up webinar to this in the end of February about the reporting when more is known.
31:46
That's what we have planned to talk about today.
31:51
And I think that those are the same basic steps.
31:56
Now one thing I'll point out is that there is a handout in the webinar where we've got a written manual on how to do this.
32:07
So in your interface to the GoToWebinar there's a little area with handouts and you can download a PDF that I wrote up that's going to walk you through these three approaches step-by-step.
32:19
Also, the customer care team in support has a solution article prepared that they will use to respond to any of your inquiries about the matter.
32:29
There isn't a perfect solution at this time, because it was kind of thrown on all of us, and the only thing I can suggest, because I know this is a bit cumbersome, is that it may be an opportunity to drive some new sales, and if you find that the steps I've shown or not something you can manage, or you'd like hands-on assistance with managing them, you can engage the professional services team like you can for anything.
32:59
So I'll just show you exactly how.
33:01
So you can go to our website here at sales at winwardsoftware.com.
33:06
And I honestly think it's a little overkill for this situation, but if you want someone like me to walk you through it now, and in February, you could arrange that.
33:15
you'd go to Advanced Training Options, and you'd buy one of these plans here.
33:19
And I think if you talk to your account manager, there does exist a two-hour version of this plan for certain circumstances, and we could probably arrange that.
33:29
But I would suggest the professional services, you wanna get into that if you have other things to talk about as well as this, but you'd like help with this and some other things.
33:39
Then it might make sense to say, get a five-hour plan, and maybe we spend an hour, hour and a half on this problem and then you've got some other things to talk about where you've got someone like myself giving you a hand with those things.
33:58
And Arno, I see your question there.
33:59
How would I handle a return during this period if that return was purchased prior?
34:04
Well, when they bought it, they paid you tax.
34:09
And when you take the return, you're going to have to give that back.
34:17
So you'd want to toggle the line on just on that product in that instance.
34:24
So you'd use the first approach that we looked at today or nowhere, you'd just toggle it on that one line after you put the negative quantity, you're going to want to turn the taxes on because they paid taxes when they bought it.
34:38
And I guess you'd have a reverse problem if they bought it during the rebate and then they return it after, you'd have to check if that's the case.
34:48
I can't say that this is a very easy thing to deal with, really, for any small business.
34:57
And the instructions for today, Lori, in your access to the webinar, there should be a little handouts area, which I can't show you because it's in your interface.
35:10
And in the handouts area, it's named, it's a PDF.
35:13
It says GST and HST rebate guide.
35:17
Also, if you email or call support, they have a solution article that they just send you a link to as well.
35:24
So there's more than one way to get some help.
35:31
So I wanted to thank you all for coming today, and I'm sorry this is happening right before your busy season.
35:36
It's a bit of a disruptive thing.
35:39
Very helpful for the people, the consumers, but a little bit problematic for the small business owners and thanks for coming and being patient with me showing you the best we've got to help you with anyway.
35:53
I hope you guys all have a Merry Christmas if we don't see you in another webinar and best of luck with this promotion from the government.
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