Tax Rules

Taxes rules can be a powerful way to automatically select the correct taxes in the right scenarios. Taxes rules are applicable for both POS transactions and sales orders.

POS Transactions

Taxes can be configured on a per POS item level if you want to apply certain taxes for certain items. However this can get hard to maintain with a high number of POS items and it may make more sense to taxes items based on rules. If this makes more sense in your situation, you must indicate each POS item that should use tax rules. To do so, edit a POS item and check the Use tax rules checkbox. This will hide the available taxes and indicate tax rules will be used instead.

Sales Order Items

No setup is needed in order for tax rules to apply to sales order items other than setting up the tax rules themselves as shown below.

Creating a Tax Rule

Next, tax rules need to be set up. Under Account > Tax Rules, click New Tax Rule.

Tax - First, select the tax that should be applied by this rule.

Location - Next, choose if this tax should apply for sales at all locations or just a specific location. We will select ALL since we want this tax rule to apply to sales at all locations.

Category - Next you can choose 1 or more categories this rule should apply to. In this case, we only want the city tax to apply for sales on items with a category of Accessories.

Customer Zip Codes - You have the option of entering 1 or more customer zip codes to limit this tax rule to sales where the customer zip code matches one of this zip codes. Customer zip codes will be ignored on POS register sales since no customer information is available.

Delivery Intent - If this tax rule should only apply for sales order items that are to be delivered or picked up, specify that here. This allows you to target a specific tax if the item will be delivered to a certain zip code for example.

Only apply this rule if no other rules apply - Check this box if this should be a fallback rule, where it only applies if no other rules have applied. Usually if you have this box checked, you will want to place this rule at the very end of your tax rules list.

Skip all other rules if this rule applies - You can also opt to ignore all other rules if this rule applies. This ensures that you can prevent multiple tax rules from applying when you only want 1 tax.

Once all desired fields have been set, click Save to create the rule.

You can create multiple rules. When a sale is made, all rules will be evaluated and all tax rules that match all criteria will be applied. This flexibility allows you to create many individual rules to auto apply the correct taxes based on customer zip codes, categories, location, or a combination of all of them. Click and drag the 3 dots icon to rearrange the rules so the highest priority rules are evaluated first: