Prepare income tax payment notices

Modified on Mon, 14 Jul at 4:20 PM

Overview

Payment tasks in TaxLab act as reminders to check and send tax payment notices for entities in your organisation. Use payment tasks to view and update provisional tax calculations and payment amounts. These tasks integrate data from Inland Revenue and tax pools to help with calculating payment amounts. Tax notices can be sent directly from TaxLab to end users via email, or downloaded as PDFs.

Open a payment task

From the TaxLab home screen, in the navigation bar select Workflow > Payments.
Select the relevant due date. Past due dates are shown in red.
Select from:
- the name of the group
- Not Grouped or
- All Payments.
This opens the payment tasks overview screen for that date, for the view selected.
Select a task to open it.

Overview of functions

The provisional tax liability panel calculates the liability for the current tax year. This can be manually overridden by entering a new amount into the Based on forecast field.

The Instalment panel calculates the amount due at the selected instalment, less any transfers, tax pooling or credits as recorded in the software. The instalment amount will respect the target filing date of the latest drafted tax return, if one has been set.

The tax pooling panel allows users to select a date to defer payment until, then calculates the interest payable upfront using current market tax pooling rates.

The Task panel displays the Progress of the task. This is updated manually by the user, unless the send by email function has been enabled for the organisation. If task progress is updated to sent, it will display as Completed on the tax payments overview screen.
- ⚠️ Warning: Once a payment task is moved to Ready to send or a later status, it becomes locked. No further updates or changes will be applied to the task, including any changes to the tax transaction for the task.
Assigned to displays which user has been assigned the task. If the task has been completed (sent) it can no longer be reassigned.
Contact Name and Email display the details of the entity's contact. The payment notice will be addressed to the Contact Name, and if send by email is enabled, will be sent to the listed email address.
Theme, Office and Template show the format of the notice sent to the entity. When a notice is selected for printing or emailing these can be changed. The default Theme and Office are TaxLab, and the format of these can be customised for an organisation during organisation setup. Template options are:
- Inland Revenue: used for a single entity, and shows the amount due.
- Tax Traders: used for a single entity using tax pooling provided by Tax Traders to pay or finance provisional tax.
- Inland Revenue detailed: used for a single entity showing the detailed calculation to arrive at the provisional tax liability.
- Inland Revenue Group (short form and detailed): used for a group of entities.
Tax notice formats differ depending on the purpose of the notice (and the formatting of these can be customised during the organisation setup process):
- Provisional tax templates
- Final provisional tax templates
- Terminal tax templates
Selecting Open opens the filing and payment schedule for that tax year for the entity.

The Notes tab allows users to add any comments to the payment task. Any notes added to a task will make the note icon blue on the tax payments overview screen. The Files tab enables files to be uploaded to the payment task. Email history is available for organisations with send by email enabled, and will display a log of all emails sent, by user, to contact, and when.

Transactions

The lower portion of the screen displays any tax transactions in the related tax year that have been retrieved from integrations with Tax Traders or Tax Management New Zealand tax pools, or from the Inland Revenue integration, as well as transactions that have been added manually. These are the transactions which impact the Instalment panel.

Calculating residual income tax

First year calculations

If no residual income tax figure is available, either because this is the first year an income tax return is being prepared in TaxLab, and/or data from the Inland Revenue integration is not available. Manually enter the prior year’s RIT amount:

From within the payment task, in the transactions panel select New > Inland Revenue
Edit Tax year and Date to the prior year
Under Transaction select Return debit
Enter the amount as a debit (positive)
Enter any optional Notes
Select Save.

Add an estimate

If the entity uses the estimation method to calculate provisional tax, the estimated residual income tax for the current tax year to the software needs to be entered manually, so that provisional payments can be calculated using the estimator.

From within the payment task, in the transactions panel select New > Estimate
Edit the Tax year and Date to the current year
Transaction will default to Provisional Assessment
Enter the amount as a debit (positive)
Enter any optional Notes
Select Save.

Troubleshooting

Payment task is not updating

If payment task information isn't updating, it's likely because the task is in a locked state. The task will be in one of the following Progress statuses: Ready to send, Completed, Sent, Not required, or Automatically closed.

To update the task:

Open the payment task.
In the Task panel, change the Progress to the required status.
If the task is archived, change the Record status from Archive to Active before updating the progress.

Once this has been done you'll be able to make the required updates.

Payment task is not displaying

If a payment task appears to be missing, first ensure that payment tasks have been ticked for the required time period, and ensure that today's date is on or before the due date of the payment task. If payment tasks are still not displaying, please contact Support.

Entity needs to pay provisional tax at 50/50

50/50 provisional tax splits are not currently supported automatically in the software. To get the required balance to pay, enter an amount into the Based on forecast field.