Sales tax
Clients who collect sales tax have to report it on a schedule, and the hard part is rarely the filing itself. It is chasing each client for their figures, period after period, and knowing at a glance who has not sent them yet. Sales tax in Journey is built around that chase.
How it works
Turn on the clients who file sales tax and pick how often each one files. From then on, each period Journey opens a form for that client and emails them a reminder. They fill in their figures. You watch who has and has not responded, file with the state yourself, and mark the period filed.
Journey does not file anything with a taxing authority. It collects the numbers and tracks the chase; the filing stays with you.
Who can see it, and the part that catches firms out
Sales tax is the one area of Journey where access is not decided by role alone.
Two kinds of people can reach it:
- Owners and general managers, always.
- Anyone who belongs to a department whose TYPE is Sales Tax, at any role, including staff.
That second rule is the one to know about. Departments have a type as well as a name, and the type is what grants access here. A department called "Sales Tax" whose type is set to something else grants nobody anything, and the symptom is confusing: your sales tax people see no Sales Tax item in the sidebar at all, with no error to explain why.
If your team cannot find the page, check the department's type on the Departments page before checking anything else.
Enrolling clients
The Enrollment tab lists your clients and which are turned on for sales tax. For each enrolled client you set how often they file, which drives when their periods open.
Manage fields lets you decide what you are asking clients for. Different states and different businesses need different figures, so the form is yours to define rather than a fixed list.
Watching a period
The Period monitoring tab is the chase. It shows each open period and whether the client has submitted, so you can see the outstanding ones without opening anything.
Send form emails the client their form. Journey sends one automatically when a period opens, and this is how you send it again or send it early.
When you have filed with the state, mark the period filed. That closes it out and takes it off the outstanding list.
What Journey does on its own
Three scheduled jobs run daily so the chase does not depend on anyone remembering:
- Periods open on schedule and the client is emailed their form.
- Clients who have not responded get a nudge.
- Periods that stay outstanding escalate, so they surface rather than going quiet.
How it looks to your client
A client can fill in their figures two ways. If they use the portal, sales tax appears there alongside everything else. If they do not, the email contains a link that opens the form directly with no login, which matters for the client who will never sign in to a portal but will answer an email.
Either way the figures land in the same place.
Settings
Owners and general managers can adjust the firm's sales tax settings from the Sales Tax page itself.
Good to know
Enrolling a client does not open a period immediately. The first period opens on the client's schedule, so if you enroll someone mid-period you may not see anything until the next one begins.
Unenrolling stops future periods. It does not remove periods that have already been opened or figures a client has already submitted.