I'm a little confused by your question. On one hand you are asking if you can just use the General Ledger to report on the taxes for remittance purposes (answer = Yes and many times, it's more accurate) and on the other you say there are no transactions in the General Ledger accounts (therefore nothing to report on if you used the General Ledger). Am I reading your question properly?

Under Setup, Settings, Company, Sales Taxes, Taxes, you should see the linked accounts for Sales Taxes Charged and Sales Taxes Paid. In a typical default setup, they would be 2310 and 2315 respectively but could be changed depending on how the setup was done or if the person setting up preferred different accounts.

Make sure you are running the General Ledger report on those accounts and let us know if I have misinterpreted your specific issue.

Depending on your sales tax setup, some sales tax codes do not get set to Refundable so the sales tax paid ends up as expenses instead of being sent to the sales tax paid liability account. Please check some of your purchase invoices, not to make sure the tax calculates but to makes sure the tax is sent to the liability account. In Setup, Settings, Company, Sales Taxes, Tax Codes and double-click a tax code, then check the Is Refundable column to make sure the GST or HST is Yes.

Thank you - yes, you are understanding correctly. I prefer to do the tax remittance based on the general ledger. But when I pull up those accounts, there is no info. Yet I see all the transactions in the Tax Report section, divided into appropriate collected and liability accounts. I'll check for Is Refundable and to see if/which liability account is being used.

The tax codes were all set to 'non refundable'. In the purchase invoice, the tax is calculating correcting but not being sent to a liability account. Changing the tax codes to 'yes refundable' will fix that going forward, correct, it just won't change the previous ones, will it? Is there a way to put them back appropriately so they populate the GL or is an adjusting entry needed at this point?