I only need to charge sales tax for items shipped to addresses within my state. How is this set up

[bailorsapiary]

I am setting up my website using Square.    I only need to charge sales tax on items shipped to Pennyslvania addresses.   

How can you do this?

[VanKalkerFarms]

that is how Square does its taxing, so you shouldn't have to do anything special.  As you go thru the checkout process tax will or won't be added based on the address entered.

[jmarcv]

Is there info ANYWHERE that tells how this works?

I have been playing with it and see incorrect rates.  Also, seems shipping out of county adds the tax for the other county and city as well.  Don't think I want to be submitting taxes to all the entities in my state, or is this handled by square?

[Valentina]

I want to make sure we're on the same page here before digging in, @jmarcv.

Are you asking about how to set up a sales tax for items shipped to addresses within your state, as the original post is titled? I'd also like to confirm where you are currently adding taxes - are you doing this within your Square Dashboard, or are you referring to the tax settings for your Square online store?

For your question about tax compliance, we always recommend reaching out directly to a tax professional. We're not able to provide legal or tax advice about whether you are responsible for collecting sales tax on online orders. Thanks for understanding, and we'll be looking for your response!

[jmarcv]

Well, the main thing I am asking about is these taxes that magically appear when the ship to address is changed.  Obviously square is doing some tax table lookups in the background that have NOTHING to do with my tax settings.  I am GUESSING the difference is between how and what tax is used based on shipping or pickup, but I am not finding any documentation that goes very deep.  Further, there is NO info I have found yet that indicates if sales or tax reports will break it all down. And, for another day, still debugging, turning tax off per item seems to be ignored by this 'magic' tax system.

Example. I set up a 2.9% tax rate. My ONLY tax rate.

My address is in Colorado. If the address is from Crested Butte Colorado, the tax magically calcs to the correct tax rate (state, county, city)

If it is an address not in the city limits, (state, county)

If it is Denver, it picks up the Denver taxes (state, county, city)

So the question is if there is documentation somewhere explaining this, or if I am supposed to simply trust that it works?

[jmarcv]

OK, finally found the info on the weebly side of things.

It is in Settings - taxes, and appears to override settings everywhere else, including checking things as 'tax exempt' (they still get taxed.)

I find it confusing that there is taxes in the store and taxes in the dashboard;  items in the store and items in the dashboard,  and things just do not seem to integrate together well.

[Valentina]

It definitely does sound like you're referring to orders placed through your online store that you have built out through Square, especially because you've mentioned Weebly.

If that's the case, it sounds like you're seeing the Automatic Tax Calculator at work, @jmarcv. This tool is intended to charge US sales tax based on your store address(es), as well as where you are shipping your order to. The calculator tool is explained in detail in this article from our online support center - I'd recommend taking a quick peek here, and let us know if you still have questions!

[jmarcv]

Yes, I am beginning to see that there is a big difference between the square side, intended for local selling, and the online side.  Yes, that is the document I finally ended up finding.

2 remaining questions I am not seeing.

What if the tool is wrong?  It looks accurate for the most part, but I found it 1% off in my county.

And # 2, I mentioned before, can I assume reports will give me a break down on the taxes collected by taxing area?

[AdamB]

Those rules are updated to maintain accuracy so you shouldn't need to worry about checking them. As for reporting, I don't know that the reports in your dashboard will break it down by location, though you could export orders from within your online store Dashboard itself and use that to filter down taxes per area. We have a guide on exporting orders in our online store support site as well.

[jmarcv]

> so you shouldn't need to worry about checking them.

Well, my only 2 taxable sales are WRONG! And not having a report to break it down is going to be a deal breaker with me and square.

In the meantime, is there a way to disable the auto tax feature?  If I need to do my reports manually, then I might as well do them correctly.

Thinking my option is to mark everything non taxable and assume I will eat taxes from my markup.

[AshleyK]

@jmarcv If you would like to remove tax reporting and taxes from being applied to your sales, you can simply delete the tax from your account under Items > Taxes. This can be done on either the Square Dashboard or the Square Point of Sale app and it will remove our calculation of the taxes.

If that doesn't work out for you, and you want to do this reporting outside of Square, then you can create a variable priced item called "tax" and apply it to each sale so that customers can still see what portion of their bill is tax.

Thanks for your time! 

[jmarcv]

Removing the tax from the dashboard does NOT disable the automatic tax calculation at the online store checkout, btw.

And adding a variable cost will not work for shipping, since the variable costs are dependent on where they are shipped to.