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Troubleshoot VAT settings for your website

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If you don’t see your VAT settings displayed correctly on your Square Online site, there are several troubleshooting measures you can take to help make sure they appear properly when customers order online.

Before you begin

  • Understand how to properly apply VAT settings to your website. To start, learn how to create and manage sales tax settings.

  • Make sure you’ve republished your site after making any updates to your online VAT settings. Learn how to publish and unpublish your website.

  • When testing a VAT application to a test order, make sure you complete most of the online checkout process so taxes populate on the final order amount. Taxes only populate towards the end of the checkout process.

DISCLAIMER: Although Square provides tools that help you efficiently create and manage taxes, we cannot guarantee the applicability and accuracy of our tax tools. We also cannot offer tax advice or consulting services. It is solely your responsibility to accurately configure, charge, collect and remit applicable taxes on your orders. To ensure taxes are applied and filed correctly for your specific business needs, we recommend consulting a tax adviser.

Troubleshoot online taxes

You can manage all tax settings, regardless of where in Square they appear, from one place.

VAT is included in your item prices

Make sure the inclusive tax option isn’t selected when creating your VAT. You can edit your tax settings at any time.

  1. Sign in to Square Dashboard and go to Settings > Account & Settings > Payments > Sales taxes.
  2. Under either of the tax override options, click Manage settings.
  3. Under ‘Automatic and manual taxes calculation method’, click Additive tax. With this option, VAT is added on top of the unit price and show up as a separate line item on customer’s receipts. This is most common in North America.
  4. Click Save.

Items are marked as tax exempt

Make sure the exemption rule option isn’t toggled on when creating your VAT. You can edit your tax settings at any time.

  1. Sign in to Square Dashboard and go to Settings > Account & Settings > Payments > Sales taxes.
  2. Under ‘In-person sales taxes’, select one of your taxes.
  3. Toggle off Add exemption rule.
  4. Click Save.

Items are marked as non-taxable

Make sure your items aren’t set as non-taxable. You can update this for your items at any time.

  1. Sign in to Square Dashboard and go to Items & services (or Items & menus or Items & inventory) > Items > Item library.
  2. Select an existing item.
  3. Under Details, click the VAT drop-down menu and toggle Non-taxable itemoff. Click Done.
  4. Click Save.

You can also set multiple items as non-taxable using bulk actions in your item library. Learn how to bulk-edit and update items.

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