You can explore the Tax Settings in the Control Panel to add and manage taxes used in SI.
To access the Tax Settings, click the following icon.
This will open a form with all the Tax Settings.
Add and Manage Taxes
The Tax Settings form allows you to apply tax rates or tax groups you have created.
There are two primary settings on this form.
#1 Taxes are the same for all taxable products and labor
This is the most commonly used setting, which applies the same tax or tax group to all products and the same tax or tax group to all labor.
You set your tax or tax group here, and the tax rate will be applied to all products and labor items marked as taxable.
#2 Taxes are set on each product and labor
This will allow you to set the tax rates for each product and labor item.
When this option is selected, there is no "Taxable" check box for Items; instead, there are dropdown menus for setting a tax or tax group for the item.
For products, you have two fields.
For labor items, you only have the Labor Tax field.
SI has two default Taxes: Tax and Labor Tax, each assigned a "0" value. To add and edit taxes, click the Manage Taxes link on the form.
The Manage Taxes form will open.
You can add, edit, and delete taxes and tax groups here.
Taxes and Tax Groups
When you click New > Tax, the New Tax form opens. You can enter a name for the tax and a rate.
When you click New > Tax Group, the New Tax Group form will open. You can enter a name and add your taxes to the group.
Tax groups are useful if multiple taxes need to be applied to products and labor.
Additional Tax
This option allows you to enter a set value for any additional tax you want to add to projects, service orders, and service plans.
This Additional Tax amount will NOT transfer to QuickBooks on an estimate.
Use Tax
A use tax is applied to an item's unit cost, not its price. Your SI Catalog has a Use Tax setting for each product.
You can create specific purchase taxes or use any existing ones you have set up.
When you set a purchase tax for a product, you will be prompted whether or not to remove the "Taxable" option for the product. You will likely want to do this as it is not common to tax products that have had use tax applied to them.
This prompt can be turned off/on via your Application Settings.
There is a setting to choose whether or not you want purchase tax to be included in your margin and markup calculations for products.
This setting does NOT respect your Price Settings option, shown below when use tax is added or changed for a product.
There is a rule in SI that we will never change the unit price for a product with tax added. Instead, the margin and markup will recalculate. You can manually change the margin and markup to what you want it to be after applying the use tax to the product.
Avalara Tax Integration
All users of SI will have the option of doing a tax lookup through Avalara for projects.
You can also enter your Avalara account information for expanded tax functionality.
Check out this article for more details.
Report Settings for Tax
If you wish not to summarize your taxes on reports, i.e., display each tax within a tax group, or if you wish to change the wording from "Sales Tax" on our reports to something else.
For example, change it to "VAT. There are Report Settings for this.
When not summarizing taxes, and when using the "Additional tax" option above, you can choose the display name for the "Additional tax" name (default is "Surtax.")
Check out this article for more details.