Adding custom taxes in Australia

[aflaserdesigns]

Hi All,

I apologise if this has already been raised in another thread.

I am new to square and setting up my new site and was surpirsed that Square does not have any features to automatically add credit card processing fees at checkout or add custom taxes within Australia.

Is anyone else having this problem and has anyone found a way around it?

[_Violet]

Hi @aflaserdesigns, Thanks for reaching out! Additionally, welcome to the Square Seller Community! 🎉

With Square, you can create and manage taxes from the Square app and online Dashboard. Square’s fees are taken out of the total amount of each transaction, including tax and tip. 

I hope this information is helpful but please do let us know if you have any additional questions. Always happy to help! 😊

[aflaserdesigns]

Hi Alanah,

Thank you for your message. I have created by own taxes however it would not apply at checkout. I spoke to someone at Square support who advised me that the reason it would not apply was because that function was not available for Australian customers.

Is that incorrect? If so I would love to know why my custom taxes are not applying to my product sales at checkout.

Thanks

[Seamus]

Hey @aflaserdesigns,

I'm our Australian Community manager based out of Melbourne - can you tell me a little more about the issue? Which Square product are you referring to - eg Square Point of Sale, Square Online, Appointments etc?

Australian accounts with ABNs registered for GST should automatically have this tax set up via your tax settings:

If you're referring to Square Online specifically, things do currently work a little differently, in that Square Online presently doesn't display GST amounts within the overall portion of the sale and doesn't generate official tax invoices (what your customer get sent instead is an order confirmation email). Tax Invoices can still be sent that show the GST breakdown from your Square Dashboard transaction history.

Let me know a little more about the exact nature of what you're seeing and what products you're using, and we'll see if we can get to the bottom of it!

[aflaserdesigns]

Hi Mark,

Thank you so much for the prompt response and help.

I was testing to add a custom tax/fee such as a processing fee through my ecommerce site. 

I would go to my tax settings and apply a custom tax called processing and apply a 1.5% tax per item.

I applied this custom tax to all products. 

When I go to checkout it will not apply the 1.5% fee.

[Seamus]

@aflaserdesigns got you - there are indeed limitations with Australian taxes being able to be added to Square Online at the moment. If you have GST applied as an inclusive tax in Square, then this will be included in the amounts of your items being sold online, with the total amount for an order marked as GST inclusive. However, Square Online doesn't specifically support calculation of Australian tax amounts or additive taxes if you've applied them to products.

This is admittedly a pain point and something I'm hoping will be added in a future update.

Likewise, the ability to apply surcharges is not currently available with Square in general, which I think is ultimately what you're looking for here? Again this is a pretty big request for the market and one I think the key thing you're looking for here is the ability to add a surcharge? This happens to be one of our most requested features for Australia, if you'd like to add your voice here please feel free to comment on this thread.

Our suggestion for how to approach this in the meantime would be to build in card processing costs into your overall product margins as you might other costs of operating (eg utilities, staffing, rent etc). Probably not the answer you're looking for, but it's how you'd need to go about it for now if you wanted to add a surcharge for card processing fees.