Shopify - Tax Overrides

Disclaimer: The tax rates shown in our examples are for demonstration purposes only.  They are not accurate, and should not be used for your own tax rates.

Shopify Tax Overrides

Some states and provinces may charge different tax rates for certain product groups.  For example maybe the states/provinces you do business in exclude food from sales tax, or charge a reduced sales tax on books. To accomplish this via integration follow the below instructions to setup taxes for Lightspeed Retail Cloud and Shopify to calculate correctly.  

Recommended: Coordinate Tax Override setup with the Accumula Support team.

Note: Documentation for other Point of Sale solutions is coming soon. If you have questions about how to setup Tax Overrides please contact Accumula Support for assistance.

Temporarily Disable Order Download

Note: For users who haven't yet connected their integration to Shopify these order download steps can be skipped.

In your Accumula Settings temporarily disable order download settings.  Orders and the inventory changes associated to them can be synced after Tax Override setup is complete.  If you have any concerns about disabling order download please contact Accumula Support.  

1. Login at Accumula.com.
2. Navigate to Apps > Shopify > Orders.
3. Ensure the following are set to OFF:
   • Download Unfulfilled Orders
   • Download Fulfilled Orders
   • Download Archived Orders
   • Download Third Party Orders
   • Download Refunds
4. Save.

Recommended: Make a note of your previous download settings so you can re-enable them later.

Important: Leaving order download enabled will cause non-blocking errors while making changes to your taxes and incomplete transaction data in Lightspeed Retail.

Lightspeed Retail Taxes

In Lightspeed Retail items can be charged a different tax by following these steps:

Create a Tax Class

1. Navigate to Settings > Tax Classes.
2. Click "+New Tax Class" in the upper right.
3. Name the new Tax Class.
4. Save.

Assign the Tax Class to Items in Lightspeed

1. Navigate to Inventory. Find your Item.
2. In the Item Details page select the "Tax Class" drop down menu.
3. Select your Tax Class for this item.

Note: If you have Update Tags or Update Type set to ON, using a shared and easily identifiable Category or Tag will help when configuring Shopify settings.

Lots of Products? 

Tip: Tax Class can be assigned to products in bulk using Data Tools for Lightspeed Retail.  

Assign the Tax Class to a Sales Tax

1. Navigate to Settings > Sales Taxes.
2. Select the Sales Tax rate which is normally applied but needs a special rate for this Tax Class.
3. Select the Tax Class from the "Class" menu.
4. Enter the Tax Rate which will be charged for that tax class as the Class Tax Rate.
5. Click "+Add New Rate"

Once Lightspeed Retail tax classes are setup, assigned to items, and given a tax rate, you can move to the Shopify Tax Override setup below.

Shopify Tax Override Setup

In Shopify product collections can be charged a different tax as part of a Shopify Tax Override.  Shopify provides some great documentation on Tax Overrides in their User Guide.  We recommend reviewing their documentation if you haven't already, but will continue our above example to demonstrate.

Create a Collection

Tax Overrides in Shopify must be applied to product collections.  The products you assigned a unique tax class to will need to be included in a collection on Shopify for tax override purposes.  Depending on your settings if you included a shared Category or Tag for each of the products assigned the unique tax class, that data may sync to Shopify as the product Type or as a product Tag. For the purpose of this example we'll be assuming that all of the example products have the Product Type "Food" and use the tag "Food" in Shopify.

Again, Shopify provides some great documentation about this in their User Guide.

1. Navigate in Shopify to Products > Collections.
2. Click "Create Collection" in the upper right.
3. Give the Collection a Title.
4. For an Automated Collection select the criteria Shopify will use to populate the collection. In this case we use Product Type is Equal to "Food".
5. For Manual Collections, each product will need to be manually added / removed to the collection as products need to be added or removed from the list.

Create Tax Override

1. Navigate in Shopify to Settings > Taxes.
2. Select the "Destination" Country.
3. Navigate to the bottom of the page and click "Add a tax override".
4. Select the Collection to apply a tax override to.
5. Select the Location to apply a different tax rate.
6. Enter the tax rate to charge for the products in that collection.  This will be the tax rate used instead of the normal tax rate for the Location selected.
7. Select "Add Override".

Per Location Overrides

Tax Overrides are per "Sales Tax" in Lightspeed, or "Location" in Shopify.  For example "Food" may have different tax rates in different states or provinces.  You may need to create multiple overrides or apply the tax class to multiple sales taxes to achieve your desired results.

Enable Order Download

Once the above steps are complete you may re-enable order download.

1. Login at Accumula.com.
2. Navigate to Apps > Shopify > Orders.
3. Switch the following download settings back to their previous setting:
   • Download Unfulfilled Orders
   • Download Fulfilled Orders
   • Download Archived Orders
   • Download Third Party Orders
   • Download Refunds
4. Contact Accumula Support to re-sync orders placed while order download was off.

If you have any questions please contact Accumula Support.