Can I have one g/l for sales tax due per state in Netsuite?

Overview

You want to know if you can use more than one Sales Tax Payable - US in NetSuite so you can continue to report per state.

Environment

NetSuite

Resolution

• Many customers manage their taxes before Avalara by making one GL account for sales tax due per state.
• When Avalara comes into the picture, we use one tax code per country to calculate tax generally, so there is no longer any need to maintain multiple GL accounts.
  • This means you keep one GL per country instead of one GL per state.
  • The suggestion for reconciliation is to match up document to document to tie out your overall numbers to the amount in the country level sales tax due account.
• Since any NetSuite tax item/code starting with "AVATAX" triggers the AvaTax service and each tax item is tied to a tax account, you can create multiple tax items (for example: AVATAX-WA) and then link those to state-specific tax accounts. See Create Tax Codes in NetSuite. 
  • This is more complex to setup and has more risk to maintain (for example, a customer set to AVATAX-WA [tied to the Washington GL] but then shipped to California would calculate California tax but be reported for Washington within NetSuite).
  • Because you can run more accurate reports more easily in Avatax Update, we do not recommend this option.

NOTE: Avalara has an initiative to bring one tax code and g/l accounts per state being introduced into all of our integration. Netsuite is targeted for this enhancement as well so this will likely change in the future.