To ensure accurate tax calculation and compliance with tax laws, setting up taxes accurately is one of the crucial steps for businesses. NewStore Omnichannel Cloud facilitates automatic tax calculation for each order, leveraging third-party providers, such as Avalara AvaTax and Vertex, or custom tax provider that allows you to integrate your own tax provider or another third-party provider. Additionally, NewStore allows you to configure a default fixed tax rate to process transactions when network connectivity is unavailable.
Calculating taxes
Retailers can set up and calculate tax using either of the following methods:
Using an integrated tax calculator
NewStore has productised integrations with Avalara AvaTax and Vertex, to calculate taxes and fees. This includes fees like the Colorado Retail Delivery Fee and Minnesota Road Improvement and Food Delivery Fee, charged to your customer for each order. These fees are based on the tax laws and regulations applicable to the order. For a detailed step-by-step guide on calculating taxes using an integrated tax calculator, see this tutorial.
Creating a custom tax provider
You can configure the NewStore platform to use your own custom tax provider that uses the NewStore tax provider webhook schema for calculating taxes and fees. Our custom tax provider integration solution empowers the retailer to calculate taxes and seamlessly communicate the information back to the NewStore platform during the checkout process.
Custom tax provider integration solution be used with the following scenarios:
Custom tax provider that calculates taxes internally.
Custom tax provider that acts as an adapter for a third-party tax provider.
For a detailed step-by-step guide on setting up a custom tax provider, see this tutorial.
Using a fixed tax rate as a fallback
NewStore Omnichannel Cloud allows you to configure a default fixed tax rate to ensure that a sale is completed and taxes are calculated even when Associate App is offline, or the third-party tax provider is not reachable. For a detailed step-by-step guide on calculating taxes using fixed tax rate, see this tutorial.
Important
In fiscal countries, taxes are re-calculated when the offline order is uploaded to the NewStore platform.
Using a fixed rate per country
Retailers who do not use a tax calculation provider, NewStore Omnichannel Cloud allows you to define a fixed tax rate for each country that you do business in. This strategy cannot be used in combination with or as a fallback to any other tax strategy defined in NewStore. For a detailed step-by-step guide on calculating taxes using a fixed tax rate per country, see this tutorial.
Important
The fixed rate per country is a basic tax calculation strategy that does not consider tax classes, the source of the sale, and the shipping origin and destination.
To calculate taxes with all these considerations, we recommend that you integrate a third party provider like Avalara or Vertex.
About tax committing
In addition to calculating taxes at the time an order is placed in Associate App, NewStore offers the option via our Avalara Tax Accelerator Plugin, to send the tax details of the completed orders to Avalara. This allows retailers to use Avalara for reporting and filing.
When using the optional Avalara Plugin, tax committing is enabled, NewStore sends the tax information to Avalara if the taxes were calculated within the NewStore platform. The tax information sent includes tax type, rate, and amount on completed orders.
To learn more about this plugin, please contact your NewStore Omnichannel Success Manager.
Note
When using an alternative tax provider, NewStore APIs and events can be used to commit taxes. For more information on configuration settings for this feature, see Enabling tax committing for Avalara integration.
Use cases for tax committing
The plugin processes NewStore Event Stream events to track sales and return transactions covering the below transaction types:
Sales
Returns/ refunds
Exchanges
Blind returns
For each transaction the plugin creates or adjusts an existing tax transaction in Avalara.
The plugin supports checking a specific order extended attribute to ignore the order event and not create a tax commitment transactions
This is useful for injected orders for which the source system already has performed the tax commitment (e.g. eCom)
The plugin can be configured to ignore historical order transactions
Committing the transactions can be toggled on or off
The plugin relies on the NewStore Event stream and has a monitoring mechanism to ensure that the Event Stream integration is running. It will restart the integration automatically on a daily basis in the event it detects that it has stopped. Furthermore, it will create the integration if it doesn’t exist or update it in case the URL endpoint is set to an incorrect value.
By leveraging the NewStore Avalara tax commitment plugin, retailers can use Avalara to file taxes in the US. Committing tax transactions as soon as sales and returns have been performed is a prerequisite to do so.
Important
NewStore does not recalculate taxes for instances where the tax liability may have changed, such as:
appeasement refunds
cancellations
changes in shipping information
item swaps
rerouted fulfillment