Zen Cart, GST, PayPal and Xero issue

[lloyd_borrett]

G'day,

I've just realised that there is a major problem with the way Zen Cart, Paypal and Xero work together in our Australian business.

We use Zen Cart for online sales. 10% GST is included on orders for local delivery. GST isn't included on orders being shipped overseas.

We use PayPal to accept the payments.

We regularly transfer the money sitting in PayPal into our bank account.

In Xero (the online accounting software) we get a data feed from the bank. So the payment from PayPal comes through and is treated as our online sales, inc GST.

Within Xero we have no way of knowing what part of that online sales amount was ex GST. Thus our handling of GST is wrong on all orders delivered overseas. We're reporting that we've collected more GST that we actually have been paid. So we're out of pocket by 10% on all overseas shipments.

How do you resolve this issue? What's the fix, other than turning off overseas shipping?

Best regards, Lloyd Borrett.

[RixStix]

I realize that this may be an apples to oranges issue but the way we do it is....

Let zencart keep track of the individual orders details and manually input a single invoice into our accounting software (quickbooks) per month using the zencart monthly sales report data with a single line item for sales with tax and single line item for non-taxable sales.

Our accountant could care less about the individual sales or individual customer information.

Quickbooks keeps track of the total sales and the portion for which tax is due. Print the sales tax report, copy the figures onto the government sales tax form and write the check.