Auto Repair Shop Books Cleanup Four lines, dollars left off
The shape is the point. A made-up balance would be a lie, so the amounts stay blank.
The sketch
Labor is the time on the repair order, the hours the bay actually spent.
Parts are the items a vendor billed the shop, priced at cost on the way in and at the ticket price on the way out.
Tax collected is the amount the ticket called tax. It is held until it is sent to the state where the shop sits. It is never income on this sketch.
The deposit is what the bank received after the processor kept a fee. The fee is an expense of its own, not a bite taken out of the tax and not a bite taken out of the labor.
Read down the four sentences and you have the whole assignment. Every other page on this address is one of those sentences getting into trouble. An oil change collapses labor and parts. A warranty claim hides the labor because the customer paid zero. A sublet puts someone else's work inside your labor. A July mile is not even on the ticket, and it still has to use the rate for the day it was driven.
Why the amounts stay blank
A sample that invents a $400 ticket teaches the wrong lesson, because a reader starts checking the arithmetic and forgets the shape. The shape does not need arithmetic. It needs the four names kept apart. When a real ticket arrives, the amounts are filled from that ticket and from the vendor bill, not from an example on a website.
The same restraint covers the state tax rate. Printing one would make this sketch look local to one state and wrong in the others. The liability line is national. The percent is not. We leave the percent where it belongs, on the state's own page, and we keep the line.
Use it on one ticket
Take a repair order from last week and write the four names in the margin. If two of them have to share a number, that shared number is the thing to send us. The sketch did its job when you can see the share.
Send a sketch
You will be talking to the Steven Palmieri practice.