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Beta Member

A significant proportion of my tax settings were erased at some point in September

I use Square for Retail, but I am not sure how the modules interlink and if this is a POS issue. However, yesterday I noticed while serving a customer that the item I was ringing up had no taxes applied and it should have. When I started looking further, I saw a significant proportion of items that should have had tax applied didn't.

 

This morning I've looked through old exports of my item library and found that as of September 6 all of my tax rates were properly applied in the database. However, by September 26 a significant number of them had no tax rates applied.

 

I need to understand how this happened. The last time I looked at tax was because Square automatically applies all taxes to new items that are created, which breaks the integration from Amaka that imports my daily sales data to Xero. 

 

Did your team release a software update that somehow erased my tax settings?

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Beta Member

I've narrowed it down - everything was fine until September 20, which was when I discovered the Amaka integration had broken because Square had multiple taxes applied. Can someone in Support look into what occurred - was there a software update that weekend? Did I do something that weekend? I'd like to be reassured that Square is not erasing my settings due to a bug with an update.

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Square Community Moderator

Hi @the-refill-lady, I'm very sorry you're experiencing an issue with your item taxes. Since this is specific to your account and someone from our Support team needs to investigate your Dashboard and taxes in details, please contact our support team for assistance. 

Emma
Community Manager, Square
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Beta Member

Hi Emma,

 

I tried contacting the Support team and I've had a most unsatisfactory experience. First, I submitted my description of this issue to them on 23 November and had no response. When I finally heard from someone on 27 November after chasing up, I explained what happened again. I had no reply again until today, when the support rep appeared to completely ignore what I had asked for and sent me instructions for how to add taxes to items! 

 

This was unhelpful, dismissive, and bad customer service. After a terse exchange I've been advised that Square doesn't keep audit trails - so apparently there is no means for your development team to advise whether or not I imported items into my library on a specific date. IF this is true it is quite a bad reflection on your development not to log such a key event in a user's data history. 

 

I find it interesting that after I discovered my taxes weren't being applied, I learned that the location of the tax settings had been changed. In fact, a pretty major update has taken place.

 

What I need from you is to be directed to the full list of detailed Release Notes for Square for Retail so I can look through and locate when the tax settings were moved and what correlation that update has to when my taxes were deleted.

 

I'm very unhappy with the lack of assistance I'm getting from Square in getting to the bottom of this, given the amount of money I pay every month in subscription fees. I used to get good service from Square and I don't know what has changed on your end but as a customer I'm not impressed. 

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Admin

Hi @the-refill-lady, I'm stepping in for Emma here as she's out right now. Thank you for flagging this and I'm so sorry that you were not given the correct information by our Support team. I have let the team know as well so they can ensure this does not happen again.

 

I'm looking at the case now myself and will take over this. To clarify: our engineering team are able to help revert item library to how it was on a certain date, and because of this, they can check when certain items are edited. I'm going to check in with them regarding your item library but in order to do so, I will need to confirm some details with you so I'll be sending you a direct message shortly.

 

About the location of the tax settings -- is this on the Square for Retail app or on the Square Dashboard? I know there have been some changes related to navigation updates but this do not affect the tax settings; it's just cosmetic changes to the menu. I can definitely include this in the ticket to our team so they can double-check and confirm as well.

 

For the release notes -- we don't have all the release notes for Square for Retail on the Seller Community. You can see version history within the app store but I can check with our team as to when the tax settings menu was moved. 

 

Let me know if there is anything else I can do for you in the meantime. 

Tra
Community Manager, Square
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Super Seller

Hello @tranguyen and @Emma_ 

 

On a more general point regarding taxes on items, I find it confusing the way taxes are managed and displayed on items in Square, specifically the way a single item shows to have multiple tax rates simultaneously. I understand that a tax rate on a single item can vary from sale to sale depending on the circumstances in which it is sold, however, the way that Square presents the tax options in Invoices looks like two tax rates are applied simultaneously to a single item during a single sale, which definitely cannot happen. It should be that only one tax rate can be applied to an item during a sale at any one time.

 

Screenshots from an Invoice:

 

Screenshot 2021-12-02 11.50.12.png

 

The same applies to discounts. How can multiple discount rates be applied simultaneously? It is impossible, so why does the Invoice indicate that you can? It should be that only one rate can be applied.

 

Screenshot 2021-12-02 11.54.45.png

 

Please pass this information on to your developers. 

 

Thank you.

Alex Jessey
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Beta Member

Hi Alex, Square will apply more than one tax to an item. I learned this the hard way when I quick added a new item via a Purchase Order I was creating. It doesn't show you taxes on those screens, so Square applied all taxes. I use Xero for accounting and have the Amaka integration importing sales data from Square into Xero every night, and having multiple taxes applied broke the import.

 

In the UK we would only apply one tax at a time, but I vaguely recall that in places like Canada you might have a local tax and a provincial tax. But it would be better for Square to allow us to set a flag to say whether the default is all taxes or no taxes, or to modify the quick add screens to ensure tax information is selected anywhere you can add a new item. 

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