Many states offer what’s called a “Tax Free Weekend” or a “Sales Tax Holiday” every year. This is a series of dates when sales tax is not charged in the state on certain kinds of items, like clothes, computers, and books right before school season, or hurricane preparedness right before hurricane season. While you should visit the website for your state’s department of revenue to learn more about your state’s program, I’ve included a partial list (compiled by the Federation of Tax Administrators here) which lists, in chronological order, the upcoming sales tax holidays for the remainder of 2018.
If you’d like to download the spreadsheet I used to create the table above and the maps so you can try to figure out what was required, you can download it from my ShareFile site.You may ask, “what does this have to do with accounting technology?”, and the answer is that I used two features in Microsoft Excel to transform the data. The first, Get and Transform Data (formerly known as Power Query) was used to import the data from the Federation of Tax Administrators website and convert it into a useful format. I then did some additional formulas in Excel to filter out the dates which occurred earlier in the year. The second, 3D Maps (formerly known as Power Map) was used to create the map showing the states on a US map so I could have an image to go along with this post.
Many other groups have articles or graphics you can share on social media related to these holidays, including the following: