Amazon, sales tax and accounting for the "Marketplace Facilitator" tax transactions
Estimated reading time: 1 minutes.
It’s 2018 and if you caught the news last year, you’ll have seen that Amazon is starting to charge and collect Sales Tax on behalf of all sellers in the state of Washington. You’ll start to notice a few new transactions in A2X: MarketplaceFacilitatorTax-Shipping and MarketplaceFacilitatorTax-Principal, these will offset and ItemPrice Tax and Shipping Tax that Amazon has charged the customer, so that it results in a total of 0 to your overall settlement. How should you account for this new type of transaction? We suggest creating a new account in your chart of accounts called “Marketplace Facilitator Tax” and collecting the amounts in there, use those to offset the “Amazon Sales Tax” accounts - which will either fully offset it if this is the only sales tax you collect, or partially offset it if you collect and pay sales tax in other states. This way you can track how much tax has been held back by Amazon for the state of Washington. We’re interested to hear from users who are starting to see this new transaction and have some ideas on how they will account for it, separately or alongside existing sales tax accounting. Please get in touch and we’ll share your tips and advice with everyone.
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