Throughout this guide, we'll use the term Taxand this should be taken to mean either VAT, GST, Sales Tax, etc 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" checkbox. If this box is checked 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:
Examples
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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.
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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.
Intra-EU B2C sales and the One-Stop-Shop (OSS)
Breww has full built-in support for calculating the correct VAT to apply to sales within the EU for EU business registered in multiple countries. What you need to do is ensure that all of your products are using Breww's managed EU tax rates rather than a manually set tax rate. To do this, go to Settings -> Product settings -> VAT rates (or similar, the wording might vary from country to country).
If you have products using a manually set tax rate (from before Breww had built in support), ensure they are all moved to the Breww-managed "EU Standard rate VAT" rate. You can do this quickly by deleting your manual tax rate. When you delete a tax rate, you'll be prompted for an alternative tax rate to updated all products, etc to use.
Finally, there will be a blue "Manage EU VAT registrations" button under the list of tax rates. If you use this, you can check all the countries in which you are registered. If you're part of OSS then you need to check all of them.
Disclaimer
Nothing in this guide should be considered tax or legal advice in any way.
This article serves as a guide on how to configure Breww to work effectively 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 correct tax rate to apply to any given sale, or anything else.
You're also responsible for verifying that Breww has applied the correct tax rates as intended. If you encounter anything you don't understand, please don't hesitate to 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.
