Thursday, March 9, 2017

Use Tax and Line Property in WBS, Forecast and actual transaction

I have encountered two separate incidents related to use tax and line property, which are totally not linked to each other. Just wanted to note this down somewhere and hence this article.

Use Tax

I created a vendor record and attached a Sales Tax group to it. Then i created an item and attached an Item sales tax group to it. After that i created a purchase order and clicked on the 'submit' button to submit the record for approval. However i got this error:

One or more accounting distributions is missing a ledger account. Use the Accounting distribution form or the Posting profile to update the ledger account.

After reading this 'generic' message, i knew there was an issue with the accounts setup. So i checked the vendor posting profile, item posting profile and all seemed to be working fine. Then i checked the VAT setup as well. Checked whether the Sales tax codes are properly setup in both the Sales Tax group and Item sales tax group. I also checked the 'Ledger posting group' but all seemed to be ok. I tried and tried but couldnt really understand why this message was coming. Then i decided to navigate to the PO lines > Financials > Distribute amount. There i realized that i could see the ledger account for Line 1, but could not see any ledger account for the tax line. I was not able to figure out why. And this was only happening with one specific vendor and not with other vendors. This gave me a firm understanding that there is something wrong with the Sales Tax group. I checked the Sales tax group minutely this time and i realized that in this Sales Tax group, for the Sales tax codes, the 'Use tax' checkbox is checked. Then i checked the 'Ledger posting group' again and realized that in the ledger posting group there is a provision to define the 'Use tax' accounts, which i completely missed. I configured the 'Use tax' accounts in the 'Ledger posting group' and then submitted the PO successfully for approval.

Use tax (From wikipedia) : It is essentially the same as a sales tax but is applied not where a product or service was sold but where a merchant bought a product or service and then converted it for its own use, without having paid tax when it was initially purchased. 

For e.g.(From technet) : Assume that you order office supplies over the Internet. You receive an invoice for USD 500, which does not include the 6 percent sales tax that is applicable in the state where the goods will be used. When you enter the vendor invoice, enter a USD 500 credit for the vendor account and a USD 30 credit for the use tax payable account, for a total USD 530 debit for the Office supplies expense account.

Line property

I created a project and then imported the WBS into it from a template. The line property in all the lines of the WBS was 'No charge' because i wanted the project transactions to be non-chargeable. I defined all the cost and sales price for all the lines in the WBS and then pushed this WBS into project forecast. The reason to define the sales price for the non-chargeable transactions was i wanted to calculate the contract value from the same. I only had a 'Fee' line in the WBS with chargeable line property and sales price defined. After i pushed these WBS lines into forecast, all the lines were successfully transferred to forecast with respective line properties and cost&sales prices. I then started posting transactions, which obviously were non chargeable as i configured the ledger posting setup and the line property setup for the transactions such that the transactions are not chargeable.
However when i ran the project statement to see budget versus actual, in the revenue section i could only see the sales value of the Fee category from the forecast. I was wondering why is this happening, if i have defined everything correctly. I was expecting to see the total of sales price of all the lines of the forecast in the revenue section, however i was only seeing the sales price for the fee category only. Then i decided to change the line property of all the lines in the forecast to 'Chargeable' and then again ran the project statement. This time, to my surprise' i could see the revenue figure exactly how i wanted it to be .i.e. the total of the sales prices of all the lines in the forecast.

From this incident i concluded that the project statement with budget will always take into account the line property of the lines in the selected forecast model to calculate the revenue figure. However this still did not matter from the actual line property on the project transaction,as they were still 'Non-chargeable' because of the project-line property setup.

However for the fixed price projects, where there is WBS, Budget and Forecast all defined for the project, then in the project statement with budget, always the 'Budget' forecast model should be selected, so as to see the revenue figure. If you select the 'Forecast' forecast model, then the revenue figure will not be see, even if the line property is billable.

Thanks
Sarang

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