Calculate Hawaii GET and file the returns

Before you begin

Hawaii's General Excise Tax is not a sales tax and doesn't behave like one. It's levied on the business's gross income, the contractor generally passes it on rather than collecting it, and the maximum pass-on rate is not the same number as the tax rate. Getting this wrong is not a rounding error — it's a margin leak on every invoice, repeated for the life of the job.

Have your GE license number to hand, and the GE license numbers of the subcontractors you intend to deduct payments to. That last one decides whether a deduction is substantiated, so it's worth collecting before the first billing rather than during an audit.

Steps

1. Go to Finance → Hawaii GET.
2. On the Configuration tab, set the county the work is in — Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi, Kauaʻi, Maui, or Kalawao — and set whether you pass the tax on.
3. Check the rate the configuration resolves to. Every county bills 4.712% from 1 January 2024. Note the word from: the counties reached that common figure at different times as each adopted its surcharge, with Maui the last to do so on that date. A job that spans the change, or an amended return for an earlier period, will not use one flat number for the whole span.
4. Use the Pass-On Calculator to compute the amount to bill. The base is the subtotal minus retainage — you are billing tax on what you're actually being paid now, not on money the owner is holding back. Retainage picks up its own tax when it's released.
5. Open the Deduction tab to record payments to subcontractors. Payments to a sub with a valid GE license are substantiated and deduct at the full rate; payments to a sub without one are treated differently. This is the single largest lever on a general contractor's GET liability, and it turns entirely on whether you collected the license number.
6. Produce the periodic G-45 from the Returns tab.
7. Produce the annual reconciliation G-49 at year end from the same tab.

What happens next

Kalawao is handled as Maui for rate purposes, which is the correct treatment and the kind of detail that only surfaces when somebody bills a job there and the return doesn't reconcile.

One boundary worth stating plainly: GET lives in its own module. It is not a line on the G702/G703 pay application screen. The pay application produces the billing; the GET module computes and files the tax against it. If you go looking for a county picker on the pay application, there isn't one, and that's deliberate rather than missing.

Where the record lives

Configuration, computed pass-on amounts, subcontract deductions with their substantiation status, and every generated G-45 and G-49 are kept in the GET module. When the annual G-49 has to reconcile against twelve periodic returns, the periods are all there with the rates that were in effect for each.

Troubleshooting

The pass-on amount looks lower than you expected: the base is net of retainage. That's correct. Compare it against the current billing rather than the contract value.

A subcontract deduction isn't reducing the liability the way you assumed: check whether the sub's GE license is recorded. An unsubstantiated payment is not treated the same as a substantiated one, and the difference shows up here rather than in a warning.

An amended return for a pre-2024 period doesn't match today's rate: it shouldn't. The counties did not all bill the same rate before 1 January 2024, and the return has to use the rate that was actually in effect for the period.