Throughout this guide, we’ll use the term Tax and this should be taken to mean either VAT, GST or Sales Tax as is applicable to the country that you’re based in.
Setting of tax rates on products
You can set an account default tax rate in Settings → Product settings. The rate set here is what will be used as the default whenever you create a new product, however, each product has its own tax rate set on it and you can change this when creating or editing products.
When it comes to placing orders for customers, assuming tax applies (see below), the rate used on each line on the order will be the rate set on the specific product. The account default rate is only used to pre-populate the form for new products.
While the majority of products you sell are likely at the same tax rate, there may be some exceptions (an example being most books in the UK have VAT zero-rated). This is why the rate on the product always takes precedence over your account’s default rate.
How to set which customers get charged tax
For each Customer type in your account, you can set whether tax applies to its related customers. You can also opt-out of tax any individual Customer account.
Both these places have a “Tax exempt” tick box. If this box is ticked on either the customer type or the customer, then tax will not be applied.
This flowchart shows the decision logic for whether to charge tax on an order:
graph TD
A[Should tax be applied?] -->B(Is 'tax exempt' ticked on the customer's account?)
B -->|Yes| Y[Tax WILL NOT be charged]
B -->|No| C(Is 'tax exempt' ticked on the customer type?)
C -->|Yes| Y
B -->|No| N[Tax WILL be charged]
C -->|No| N
Examples
- In the US (where Sales Tax is used), you may wish to ensure your Customer types are all distinct in terms of B2B or B2C to make charging Sales Tax to the right customers easier.
- In the UK (where VAT is used) exports are “zero-rated”. This is not the same as “exempt”. Export customers should not be marked as VAT exempt. Breww will automatically detect if an order is an export order and will use a 0% rate even when the product is set to use the standard rate (20% at the time of writing).
What about orders from external sales platforms (such as website orders, POS integrations, etc)
Orders that are imported to Breww from external platforms (integrations) have their tax options set by the external platform. The external platform will tell Breww if tax should be applied or not and in most cases will also tell us the amount of tax to apply. If you have any orders from external platforms with the incorrect tax amount, please first check with the external platform as the problem most likely lies there.
Disclaimer
Nothing in this guide should be considered tax or legal advice in any way.
This article is purely a guide on how to configure Breww to work for you. It’s your responsibility to ensure that you are familiar with the tax rules applicable to you and no tax advice should be gleaned from this article in relation to the right tax rate to apply to any given sale, or anything else.
You’re also responsible for checking that Breww has applied your intended tax rates correctly. If you see anything that you don’t understand, please ask us. Breww Ltd cannot be held in any way responsible for any incorrectly charged tax amounts, anything else related or any repercussions as a result of incorrectly reported/charged tax amounts.