Two questions: hotel tax collection, searching these forums

1) I am hoping to go live in several more weeks, and have been studying the requirement northeast Pennsylvania to collect 9% tax, which is 6% sales tax and 3% a Pocono area hotel tax. I was looking at MyLodgeTax, but they seem to has been crappy reviews. Not totally sure what true value they add for $240 per annum.

From Ownerreservations + OTAs, is there a simple way to pull collected taxes to meet the many time a year taxes that seem to need to be paid correctly?

2) how do you search these forums? I cannot seem to find a search box dedicated to the forums...

1) Yep, there are several different providers that will submit tax on your behalf, but personally I haven't used any of them. The real work is getting the right data to send to them.

If you have the taxes configured in OwnerRez, you can use the Tax Detail report to pull all of the taxes for bookings in different periods and use that to base your tax reporting. The only thing to watch there is backing out any cancels or refunds if you're paying taxes ahead of arrival.

We have a plan to do tax remittance tracking similar to how we do Owner/PM statements and payout tracking but that feature isn't in place yet.

2) There's not a dedicated forum only search, but the search box at the top of the support area will search forums, blogs, and support articles all at once.

Nuther tax question.

Some OTAs in some jurisdictions have an agreement to collect taxes. And they may collect PART of the tax (as I said, we have 6% sales and 3% hotel tax)

So, is there any way to set up each OTA in ownerrez to do the right thing, per above? Or must I handle a different way?

Think I tripped over some of the answer.

Hi Ross,

Yes, this is a specific use case that we support. Our tax settings in OwnerRez support Listing Site as a criteria. So you want to set the Listing Site so that Airbnb (for instance) is excluded if Airbnb collects that tax for you.

Let's say that Airbnb collects and remits your state sales tax of 6% but not your local hotel tax of 3%. In OwnerRez, set your tax settings like so:

* State sales tax, 6%, criteria=everything but Airbnb
* Local hotel tax, 3%, criteria=all

When our Channel Bridge tool runs, we will split out your taxes properly but then notice that the booking is from Airbnb and so the state sales tax will be dropped off.

Anyone have an idea on where to find exactly which taxes AirBNB collects, and which ones they might not?
Everything I find seems to say "we collect taxes in your area" (Colorado), and that's it. If they are not collecting/remitting all of them, I fear that I'm going to be responsible regardless, so I'm looking for a way to verify.

You need to contact them. varies by area. In mine they collect state tax and county tax but not county lodging tax.

Not sure how up to date this is, but go down to your state (USA) and click the link.

My state link shows a description and a few counties. There was also a link to the state revenue department, but it was broken. I removed everything in the URL except the actual top level website. The state revenue site seemed to match what was described on AirBnB. They discuss a 6% hotel occupancy tax, but i was pretty sure it was the sales tax (maybe under a different name).

You can look but I suggest you ponder and double check what you read for your state and counties if any.

https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/653/in-what-areas-is-occupancy-tax-collection-and-remittance-by-airbnb-available

Another thing you can do is grab a channel bridge export for bookings in the past. We pull the tax details for what Air and VRBO directly charge and remit separately as guest fees.