Set up taxes

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 to send the tax details of the completed orders to Avalara. This allows retailers to use Avalara for reporting and filing. 

When 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.

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

Tax committing using the productized Avalara integration is limited to in-store orders. The following table lists the use cases that are supported, and the limitations.

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

• Configuring taxes and tax providers

• Set up payments

• Retrieving tax information

• Setting up a custom tax provider