I was speaking with a business owner the other day and they use Infusionsoft for their business, however were struggling with the setup of GST (Goods and Services Tax). They are a GST registered business in Australia and therefore must charge GST. Also they operate within the B2B space (Business to Business), therefore their clients require a tax invoice for goods and services sold for their own financial records.
I was a little surprised to hear that in order for this business to issue a tax invoice to their customers, they were going into a separate financial system to set up the new customer, create the invoice, save the invoice and then email the invoice. This was obviously to ensure that the client received the tax invoice of the transaction as required by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO).
As this business wasn’t utilizing Infusionsoft and they were going into a different system, this was taking between 10-15 minutes per invoice that they issue. Can you imagine if you have to do this 6 times per week… that easily over an hour in time every week! In this instance they were doing it themselves, however I’ve heard other businesses unfortunately needing to pay a bookkeeper to issue a tax invoice, so there was an additional cost as well. I asked this particular business owner if they had looked to utilizing Infusionsoft for invoices to be able to quickly and easily get an invoice to a customer, and they had not.
WOO HOO! An opportunity for automation here we come!
Here’s the thing. The ATO has rules that all GST registered businesses must comply with and the unfortunately the reality is that how Infusionsoft is set up doesn’t automatically mean that it will satisfy these rules.
After speaking with a couple of clients on this topic recently, I wanted to make sure that everyone had access to the steps that are critical to setting up GST in Infusionsoft. These steps are important to follow whether you are including the amount in the overall product cost or actually splitting the tax amount out separately within Infusionsoft. This will impact what you need to put on an invoice and how this can be set up in Infusionsoft so you don’t need to go to another system to create an invoice. Also, you can be communicating clearly to your customers if the products and services that they are purchasing include or exclude GST.
If you’re interested in gaining access to this exclusive online GST course on what you need to know to set up GST in Infusionsoft, and the step by step approach to configure your order forms, invoices and ecommerce/tax setup, click on this link to find out more today. I look forward to helping you achieve compliance as well as additional automation in your business around your GST setup in Infusionsoft.
