Syncing Sales Tax in Shopify orders with QuickBooks Desktop

Learn how to streamline your sales tax reporting process by syncing sales tax information from your Shopify orders with QuickBooks Online, ensuring accurate financial records and simplified tax compliance.

Written by the MyWorks Team

Updated at October 3rd, 2024

MyWorks makes it as easy as possible to handle accounting for the sales tax collected in Shopify. We'll automatically sync the tax charged on the Shopify order into QuickBooks Desktop as we sync the order: no setup needed on your part!

MyWorks is fully compatible with the automated Shopify Tax service in Shopify - commonly used in the US; as well as global tax rates configured in Shopify for any non-US country.

Syncing as a line item

This approach is most commonly used in the US, if you have Automated Sales Tax configured in Shopify to charge many different tax rates in different states or counties through the US. To avoid having to create each of these tax rates in QuickBooks and map them separately, MyWorks can sync the sales tax collected as a line item into QuickBooks so QuickBooks still accurately tracks the total tax collected. Shopify tax reports can then also be used to pull the detail of sales tax collected for different states/counties.  

To enable this setting, simply visit MyWorks Sync > Settings > Tax and enable the setting to sync sales tax as a line item. Then, set both sales tax options below it, following the instructions for each setting. 

Once enabled, the Sales Tax collected in the WooCommerce order will be passed into a line item in each order synced in QuickBooks Desktop. 

Mapping tax rates

This approach is most commonly used outside of the US - in countries like Canada or the United Kingdom, where specific tax rates are set in Shopify - like 5% GST, or 20% VAT. 

To map your tax rates together, first ensure your corresponding sales tax items have been created in QuickBooks - as Sales Tax Items in your QuickBooks item list.

Then, visit MyWorks Sync > Map > Tax Rates , where you'll see your enabled Shopify tax rates on the left, and a dropdown of your QuickBooks Sales Tax Items on the right. Simply choose the matching QuickBooks tax rate that corresponds to the Shopify tax rate for each row. 

Once enabled, MyWorks will follow this tax rate mapping as orders are synced to QuickBooks - populating the correct tax rate in the Sales Tax dropdown within a QuickBooks order.   

 

MyWorks does support multiple tax rates in a Shopify order - for example GST + PST in Canada. Use the Compound Tax Mapping option in MyWorks, which allows you to map two Shopify tax rates to a single combined tax rate in QuickBooks, since QuickBooks allows only one sales tax item per order.