[Chriss]

Hi folks - I'm hoping someone can help me here but here's the history first.

I have a number of tenants that pay their rent through Centrelink however we get charged for the centrelink fee of 99c per transaction. So where rent may be $300 which the tenant pays, we only receive on our bank statement from Centrelink $299.01.

In the past, what 'used' to happen was that the full amount of the rent would be receipted against the tenant’s ledger. Then we would go in to transactions, payment, complete the details including the dissection, Allocate, Ok Ok and this would be how the centrelink fees would be dealt with. So I think in effect, we were 'paying' the centrelink fees so it can be accounted for - but no doubt the cheque numbers were then out as we were using this method.

With the formal training I had last week, I was told when I create a receipt, I can go in to the drop-down menu of details, put in the total amount but then put in the 99c in the ‘deductions’ area. When I tried that, it didn’t 'appear' correct to me so I rang Console and was given another quicker way in that I can create a ‘rebate’ for each person that we get charged the fee. Then I can just click ‘ok’ when the message comes up for that person asking if I want to apply the 99c fee.

This latter suggestion to me is by far the easiest way as I then wouldn’t need to go in to the deductions area each time if I’ve set up the rebate.

But my question now (which has come from the previous manager who still works here):

By doing it his (old manager's) way in making a 'payment', when it came time to lodge the company tax, we apparently could claim for the fees that we were being charged which could easily be a few thousand dollars. Apparently the fees appear on a ‘disbursement’ page which is then claimable.

If I was to use the ‘rebate’ solution, can we still claim for the fees? I rang yesterday to ask this question and was told I can go to Tools, Options, Fees and tick the ‘Deduct Commission on Rental Rebates’ but I couldn’t understand what the guy was talking about when I asked the question on claiming the Centrelink fees. So for the moment, I haven’t been applying ‘rebates’ until I know that by doing this, we can still claim these fees.

Any help in ‘simple’ terms would be much appreciated as I’ve never used Console before and am still learning what to do while correcting a database that hasn’t been used correctly in the past.

Thanks folks

[Beau Miller]

Hi Chriss,

It appears in the past the way that you were receipting the fee was that your company was paying the .99 cent fee to the owner. That is why you were able to claim it as an expense.

However, using the 'rebate' section while doing a receipt means that the owner is paying the .99 cents because they are only receiving $299.01 as rent income instead of the full $300

I will see if I can find an article on this for you that might explain it a bit better.

Kind regards, Beau

[Beau Miller]

Here is a topic on the Forum that I found by Lynda

http://forums.console.com.au/f50/tra...entrepay-t183/

[Chriss]

Yes - we were receipting the FULL amount but then making a 'dummy' payment to centrepay hence claiming the fee as a GST taxable supply.

Also, the company and owner one and the same.

This link still hasnt answered my question in that if I set up the tenant with the rebate, then how do we claim the 99c as a GST taxable supply? I know how to set the rebate up but need to know if we can then claim this at tax time.

It appears that by us making 'dummy' payments, this is how we can claim the Centrepay fees which can be quite a few thousand dollars each year.

[Sam Berryman]

Hi Chris
Are you sure that you can claim this as a taxable supply as residential rental payments do not contain gst, nor does the 99c processing fee?