How to set up Quickbooks Online for multiple county sales tax?

[JetCityWoman]

I have my QB set up for sales tax in my state and county, no problems for the past year. Last weekend I vended at an expo in a neighboring county and was required to collect sales tax there. Now that I'm trying to re-configure my QB to record those transactions, I can't seem to make it work right. Here are the details:

Virginia state sales tax is 4.3%.
Loudoun county is 1.7%
Fairfax county is also 1.7%

QB insists on totalling that up to 7.7% which is wrong. I don't collect tax in both counties simultaneously for the same sale, so it should only total to 6%. I did a general Google search and found one posting in Intuit's help site where someone complained about this and the response was just to file a problem report.... several years ago, with no follow up.

I can work around it by not using the group tax settings and configuring them all as separate taxes (I think...), but would rather it work correctly instead. Has anyone here had this problem? How did you get around it? It seems like such a common sense thing, I can't imagine how they got it wrong!

 

[JetCityWoman]

I finally figured out what I was doing wrong and fixed it, but now I have a related question. First, what I was doing wrong was that I was thinking it should be set up in reverse order from what QB thinks you should do. I was thinking it should be set up in the order I listed above. But QB help tells you to set it up like this:

Name: VA state and FFX county tax
Consists of: VA state rate, FFX county rate, local rate

Name: VA state and loudoun county tax
consists of: VA state rate, loudoun county rate, local rate

When it comes to computing the total sales tax on each invoice, this works correctly.

So my next question came about when I tried to record my March sales tax payment. VA is one of the states where you submit one report and payment to the state, who then distributes all the percentages to the authorities within the state. However, QB forced me to record multiple payments, one for each of the county/local combinations that I created as described above. Has anyone else run into this issue?

I made it work, after doing about 30 minutes of math to verify that the QB distributions matched with the state calculated distributions, and then manually splitting up the payment (even though I only made one). Really annoying to have my books show something different from what actually happened!