Tangible Personal Property Tax in Dynamics GP

Tangible Personal Property tax in the U.S. is a pain. It's usually calculated by county and sometimes by city as well. Essentially this is a tax on the value of assets a company maintains in that jurisdiction.

To give you an idea, we have 9 TPP tax returns that we have to file. 7 counties and two cities even though we only have operations in 5 locations. There's no consistency to the forms or calculations. We used Ernst and Young just 2 years ago to prepare these returns and they had to have the original forms and they filled them out by hand! Yuck.

GP can't fill the forms out for you, but if you setup Fixed Assets right, it can make things a lot easier.

The Location ID field for an asset holds the state, county and city location of an asset. It's not always well covered in trianing but Location ID is designed for just this scenario. This ID can be reported on via Smartlists or various standard GP reports. The reports only have access to the ID so you'll want a descriptive ID like FL-ORN-ORL (Florida-Orange-Orlando). You've got 15 characters for your description.

If you have signifcant reporting requirements, consider customizing a report to allow easier reporting on specific cities, counties or states. In some cases the county gives credit for city taxes and in another case you may have assets in both a city and the unicorporated county so very detailed reporting is important.

With well built ID and limited needs, you may be able to get away with either carefully limited Smartlists or Smartlist exports to Excel to get the TPP data you need. The bottom line is that it can be easier than what you're doing today. If you put in some work now, next year's TPP returns can be a breeze.