Bas Adjustments

[Lucy DG]

What do you do if you have made an error in a previous quarter and your bas has already been lodged.

Other than making a manual adjustment on the bas sheet for the new quarter.

Can you make the adjustment on quickbooks itself by means of a journal entry?


Regards Lucy

[gibbo]

You can make adjustments in following quarters for mistakes in previous ones. From memory (and this does need to be checked with the ATO before taking my advise), you can make up to $5,000 of adjustements without referring to the ATO, for a period of up to 18 months. Anything over this or going back further than 18 months must be referred to them them before you do it.
There are some very peculiar ways they have stated that you should do things. For instance, my advice on retail where you had register discrepancies between the actual cash and the cash register was that they should be added to the input tax credits to reduce your tax payable, not deducted from sales.
It could get interesting in QuickBooks. What you have to do is actually move things in time. Whereas you had it showing as occurring (for instance) in the previous period, you now say it actually occurred in this period. A simple journal entry cannot make it move from one time to another. You have to post it to a "Limbo" account for a while. I have to say I have never actually attempted it - but as it is a challenge, I will probably have to give it a go.
Happy for others to also have a go and post here.

[Lucy DG]

I appreciate your prompt replys Gibbo.
Yes it sounds complicated I'll have to research this further.

Regards Lucy

[gibbo]

Today I had a client who had simply deposited money instead of Invoicing and receiving Payments. Tmeant that a number of deposits needed to be shown in the current BAS period as Invoices with payments so that he could make the adjustment to the GST in this period.
What I did was to post the deposits into his real bank account from a dummy bank account on the actual days they occurred. Then I billed his customer the total amount on the 30th September. Then made a customer payment on the 30th September into the dummy bank account. This left the moneys as being received when they were and added a GST liability into the current BAS period and cleared the dummy bank account.
Tentries in the dummy bank account may look a litte queer as they initially produce a relatively large negative figure, but it all comes back to zero on the 30th September.
As he meets the requirements on adjustments, it actually gets everything in QuickBooks to show correctly and gets him out of the mess.
We actually got it to post to the "Limbo" account.