We’ve recently become aware that from December 14 2024 to February 15 2025 there will be a sales tax break on GST and HST in Canada. More on this can be found on the government website.
We’ve implemented some changes in Breww to help you to handle this.
If you’re not based in Canada, you can safely ignore this as it doesn’t apply to you 
As a Canadian brewery using Breww, you can either use our managed Canadian sales tax rates or manually manage the sales tax rate yourself (more on this can be found in our sales tax help guide). For Canada, would highly recommend using Breww’s managed tax rate rather than creating and managing your own. This guide is for people using our managed tax rate. If you have created your own tax rate, you’ll need to handle the tax break this yourself.
- In your Breww account, you’ll now see two tax rates for Canadian sales tax (previously, this was just one).
- Canadian GST/HST - This tax rate is what you will have been able to use before now. This will continue to operate as before, but for the duration of the tax break will instead zero-rate the GST/HST on sales. Any PST due will still apply.
- Canadian GST/HST (no break) - This is a new rate that will have appeared in your account today. This rate will never be reduced to 0% and will work just as the original rate has done up to now.
What you need to do
- Ensure all products that are applicable to the GST/HST break are set to use the Canadian GST/HST tax rate.
- Ensure any products that you might sell through Breww that the tax break doesn’t apply to (e.g. adult t-shirts) are set to use the Canadian GST/HST (no break) tax rate.
- Ensure any adjustments made to orders (such as delivery charges) have the correct tax rate set when you apply them.
- To start with, review each order you create to ensure the tax summary at the bottom looks correct, and let us know if you have any questions.
- We would recommend uploading a new price file to Breww soon after each rate change:
- Morning of December 14 2024
- Morning of February 16 2025
Things to note
- We opted to make the existing Canadian GST/HST tax rate receive the tax break (rather than this applying to the new rate instead) as beer is included in the applicable items and so this should result in the fewest manual changes for you.
- You can use the Raw Data Explorer to easily pull a list of all products and their current tax rate to ensure you haven’t missed anything.
- If you import sales delivered by Liquor Connect, Breww will automatically determine the correct sales tax rate on these orders based upon the product settings that you have in place.
- If you change the date of an order, this will trigger an automatic recalculation of the sales tax rate that applies (as the date change might move it into or out of the tax break period), therefore changing the invoice date might change the total price to pay for the order.
- If you have the Automatically set invoice date to the current date when invoicing an order setting enabled (in Settings → Order/invoice settings), and invoice an order on a different date from the planned date, this setting will change the invoice date and, as above, this might change the tax rates that apply to the products.
If you have any questions, please let us know. Thank you.