Switching from Cash Basis GST to Accrual Basis GST reporting

This page is for MYOB Acumatica consultants

Check all changes in a test environment before taking them live. Make sure all related features still work as expected and that your data is unaffected.

MYOB Acumatica provides users the ability to report GST on an Accrual Basis or a Cash Basis. It is crucial that implementation consultants should define and clarify the GST reporting requirements with their customers prior to implementing the system, and it is highly recommended that once a GST reporting method is decided, it should be final. However, under some circumstances, the reporting requirement needs to be changed. This knowledge base article describes how to switch from Cash Basis GST reporting to Accrual Basis GST reporting.

These instructions are for MYOB Acumatica builds 2021.117.400.6951 [21.117.0037] onward.

Scenario

Customer has gone live with Cash Basis GST in tax period 01-2022 (01/07/2021 to 30/09/2021)
Customer would like to switch to Accrual Basis GST in tax period 02-2022 (01/10/2021 to 31/12/2021)
Example BAS reporting period used in this knowledge base article is Quarterly.
There have been transactions posted in both AP and AR subledgers. But in particular, there are:
- AR Invoice 000001 – released and paid in Tax Period 01-2022
- AR Invoice 000002 – released but not paid. The payment of this AR Invoice comes in Tax Period 02-2022 (after the user has switched from Cash Basis to Accrual Basis).
- The tax report detail of period 01-2022 (Cash Basis) shows as following – as you can see, because period 01-2022 is Cash Basis, the tax report only includes invoice 000001 because this invoice is already paid

To switch from Cash Basis GST reporting to Accrual Basis GST reporting

Create a test tenant from the live tenant.
Choose a cut-off date which is equivalent for a quarter period, it means you can either go live by Oct 1 or Jan 1 or April 1 for Australia company and using July to June financial year. In the example of this scenario, the cut-off date is 01/10/2021, which corresponds to tax period 02-2022
Make sure the system does not have any ATO supplier invoices coming from BAS process.
Go to the ATO supplier Tax agency tab and set the GST recognition method as On Documents
1. Set the input and output tax entry reference as Document Reference Number
2. Leave the default reporting period as it is
3. Save the ATO supplier
Setup all the taxes to support Accural-based GST by unticking the Pending GST option in the Taxes screen (Please refer to the cash base GST configuration guide for this – in this example, only G1SALES GST is updated, but you will have to do this for all the taxes are will be reported in the Accrual Basis).
Go to Tax Periods screen, check and verify that the Tax Period set up here is correct (e.g., the start date, end date of your tax periods are correct)

Note: If you go to the prepare tax report area and you are getting some values here from previous months which was based on Cash Basis, we first have to clear those. In order to do this, go to the configuration >> reporting settings area and make sure the net tax button is unmarked for line 33 (This is to ensure that when processing BAS that belongs to a previous period that get reported in the current period, the system doesn’t post any resulting ATO AP document, in order for us to have a clean start).
Once you have set up the above then go to the prepare tax report area and process all the period up until the latest period for testing (this is already done above, see the last screenshot of the “SCENARIO” section).
Once you reach the cut off period then process some AP, AR invoices and check if it is only recognized after the payment has been applied by using the recognize AP and AR GST feature.
1. For this scenario, we’ll create a payment to pay off AR Invoice 000002 on 01/10/2021, which corresponds to Tax Period 02-2022, running on Accrual Based GST.
2. Also, we’ll create a new invoice for this new period as well: Invoice 000003. But we will not pay this invoice yet (to test if an invoice is unpaid, whether it’ll be reported in the BAS or not):
3. Go to the Prepare Tax Report screen, prepare a Tax Report for period 02-2022. Notice how only 000003 is reported but not invoice 000002. This is because when invoice 000002 was released, it was released in a Cash Based period, and the system has already tagged the invoice with Cash Basis.
To handle invoices like this, the customer or the accountant must decide whether to report those invoices in the Cash Basis period or in the Accrual Basis period:
- For Cash Basis: the user needs to create the payments for those invoices to close them off, so that when we prepare the tax report, the Tax Amount comes into the tax report.
- For Accrual Basis: the user will need to reverse those invoices out of the Cash Basis period, and recreate them in the Accrual Basis period; otherwise, they will not be reported in the BAS.

If in the previous steps, you have unticked the Net Tax box in the reporting line 33 in the Reporting Settings screen, then you need to tick it again before you process BAS, so that ATO documents can be created after the tax report is released.

Please note, this above example discussed only the AR side. You need to test for the AP side and Recognize Input GST as well. The testing procedure is similar.

Once you have satisfied with the above testing and process then ONLY apply it in live environment and make sure it has appropriate start date otherwise report period will be incorrect.