Tax Summary & Tax Reports
MyBooks has three different screens with "tax" in the name, and it's easy to open the wrong one. This guide explains what each one is for, so you can go straight to the screen you actually need:
- Tax Summary/Payments — a working screen to track how much tax you owe and record what you've actually paid to the tax authority.
- Tax Reports — a menu of read-only tax reports (which reports you see here depends on your business's country).
- GST Reports — the India-specific GSTR-1, GSTR-2, and GSTR-3B reports used for filing your GST returns. These have their own GST Reports guide.
Tax Summary/Payments — track what you owe and pay
Tax Summary/Payments is where you keep an ongoing record of your tax liability and log the tax payments and adjustments you make. It's found under Transactions > Other Transactions > Tax Summary/Payments, and is only available to Admin users.
Unlike the reports described further below, this screen isn't just a snapshot — it lets you record things: every tax payment you send to the tax authority, and any manual adjustments to what you owe.
The five tabs
- Tax Summary: For each period, shows Sales Amount, Sales Tax, Purchase Amount, Purchase Tax, Net Tax Amount, Adjustment Amount, Payable, Payment, and a running Balance carried forward from the previous period. This is your at-a-glance "how much do I still owe" view.
- Sales Details: Sales tax collected, broken out by each individual tax rate, for each period.
- Purchase Details: Purchase tax paid (input tax), broken out by each individual tax rate, for each period.
- Tax Payments: A list of every tax payment you've recorded, with date, amount, and reference.
- Tax Adjustments: A list of manual adjustments you've recorded (e.g., correcting a filed amount), with date, amount, and reference.
Use the Period filter to choose the date range, and Group By (Year, Half Year, Quarter, Month, Week, or Day) to control how the summary rows are grouped.
Recording a tax payment
- Go to Transactions > Other Transactions > Tax Summary/Payments.
- Click Tax Payment.
- Enter the Payment Date, Payment Account (the bank/cash account the money left from), and Payment Amount.
- Add an optional Reference note.
- Click Save.
The payment now reduces your running Balance on the Tax Summary tab and appears under Tax Payments. You can edit or delete a payment from that tab at any time.
Recording a tax adjustment
- Click Tax Adjustment instead.
- Enter the Adjustment Date, an Adjustment Account to offset against, and the Adjustment Amount. A positive amount reduces what you owe; a negative amount increases it.
- Add an optional Reference note, then click Save.
Tax Reports — the reports menu
Tax Reports (Reports > Tax Reports) is a menu of report tiles, not a report itself. What you see here depends on where your business is registered:
- If your business is in India, this menu shows tiles for GSTR 1, GSTR 2, and GSTR 3B — the return-format reports required for GST filing. These are documented in the GST Reports guide.
- For businesses outside India, this menu instead shows a single Tax Summary Report tile, described below.
Tax Summary Report (non-India businesses)
This report gives you a read-only breakdown of tax collected on sales and tax paid on purchases, by tax rate, for a selected period — useful for a quick reconciliation or a sanity check before filing elsewhere.
- Go to Reports > Tax Reports > Tax Summary Report.
- Set your date range (and optionally filter by Tags).
- Click Run Report.
You'll see three summary cards — Output Tax (Sales), Input Tax Credit (Purchases), and Net Tax Payable — followed by two tabs, Sales Tax Summary and Purchase Tax Summary, each listing every tax rate with its Taxable Amount and Tax Amount.
Which screen do I want?
| I want to... | Go to |
|---|---|
| See how much tax I currently owe, and record a payment or adjustment I've made | Transactions > Other Transactions > Tax Summary/Payments |
| Get a read-only breakdown of tax collected/paid by rate for a period (non-India businesses) | Reports > Tax Reports > Tax Summary Report |
| File my GST returns (India businesses) | Reports > Tax Reports > GSTR 1 / GSTR 2 / GSTR 3B — see the GST Reports guide |
See Also
- GST Reports — GSTR-1, GSTR-2, and GSTR-3B filing reports for India.
- E-Invoicing — generating IRNs and QR codes for India GST e-invoicing.