Charge sales tax or VAT

What this does

Torva applies the tax you state, in the places you say you are registered, and records what was charged on every order.

It does not work out where you owe tax, it does not source rates, and it does not file anything. What you get instead is consistency: once a place and a rate are recorded, every order shipping there is taxed identically, whether it came through your storefront or you typed it in by hand.

Before you start

Know which places you are registered to collect tax in, and the rate for each. If you are not sure, that is a question for an accountant — Torva has no way to know it and will not guess.

Tax is added on top of your prices. Tax-inclusive pricing, where the tax is already inside the price a customer sees, is not supported: it needs line totals reconciled against an extracted tax amount, which is a different job rather than a switch.

Steps

1. Open Settings → Taxes.
2. Add a registration for each place you collect tax in: a country, optionally a state or region within it, and the rate.
3. Name it the way your customers expect to read it — Sales tax, VAT, GST. That name appears on the order.
4. Turn tax on shipping on or off for that registration. Jurisdictions disagree about whether delivery is taxable, so this is set per place rather than once.
5. Add your tax ID or VAT number. It belongs to the store rather than to any one place, so you enter it once.

A second registration for a country and region you already have is refused rather than added. Two rates for one place is a mistake, not a stack.

What happens next

The most specific registration that matches the shipping address wins. Registered for the United States generally and California specifically? An order to California gets the California rate; an order to Texas gets the country rate.

Region matching ignores case and spacing, because a customer types their own address and ca, CA and California are all the same place to them.

If nothing matches the destination, the order is not taxed — and the tax is written as zero rather than left alone, so removing a registration does not leave old tax stranded on an order that is recalculated later.

The sum is:

tax = (subtotal − discount, plus shipping where that place taxes it) × rate

So a discount comes off before tax is worked out.

Common problems

An order has no tax on it. Check its shipping country and region against your registrations. The usual cause is a registration for a region the customer spelled differently, or no registration for that country at all.

A phone order was not taxed. Fixed. Orders created by hand used to skip tax while storefront orders were taxed, so the same order cost different amounts depending on how it was placed.

An edited order had the wrong tax. Also fixed. Changing an order's lines used to leave the tax belonging to the old lines, so removing half an order overcharged the customer and adding to one under-collected. Editing an order now recomputes its tax from what is actually on it.

I changed a rate and old orders did not change. Correct, and deliberate. An order records what was actually charged at the time. A new rate applies to new orders, never to history.

I need to refund the tax as well. Refunding an order refunds what was charged, tax included. There is no separate step.

A customer is tax exempt. There is no exemption flag yet. Create the order by hand and adjust it, or refund the tax afterwards.