This article aims to provide a comprehensive guide on the steps you need to take when facing changes in the tax rate, as set by your government. It addresses both scenarios: whether the tax rate for the services you provide is being decreased or increased. This guidance is crucial for ensuring your business remains compliant and financially sound during these adjustments. When referring to the tax rate, we are specifically addressing various types of consumption taxes such as but not limited to VAT, IVA, TVA, BTW, MwSt in the EU, state sales taxes in the US and any equivalents in the rest of the world.
Tax change tool
We know that legislation and tax rates, albeit rarely, change. This change creates numerous difficulties associated with manually updating the tax rates in open folios and charge templates. Therefore, we have created a special tool to help you automate this process. In it, you can set rules for the system to change taxes. The change can happen automatically on a given date, or you can activate the change manually. Here are more details:
- To configure the tool, open Settings -> All Settings -> Charges & Taxes -> Tax change policy
- Add a new policy - fill in a description to guide you on what the change will be.
- Choose whether you want the tax change to affect charge templates (1) and/or charges in open folios (2).
- If it concerns the charges in open folios, the system will filter the charges whose revenue date is AFTER the date filled in the "After revenue date" (3) field and will update only them. If you want to change all charges in open folios, fill in a past date in this field.
- If you want the change policy to be executed automatically, fill in the "Schedule date" (4) field. In that case, the policy will activate automatically, shortly after the change of date.
- Add the rules (5) to be executed. For each rule, fill in - which revenue group it relates to and possibly which category (6). Also fill in the current tax rate and the new tax rate (7).
When adding rules, you can use their order to save a lot of rules in more complex cases.
Example: If so far all overnight stays have had one tax (for example, 19%), and the change requires two things - overnight stays to become 20%, and overnight stays from the 'OWNERS' category to be 15%, you can use the order of the rules as follows. First, put the rule for the ROOMS group, without a category for 20% - this will update ALL overnight stays to 20%. In the second place, put the rule for 15% with the ROOMS group and the 'OWNERS' category - this rule will be executed after the first one and will update only this group/category to 15%.
- If you use tax codes and want to change them, fill them in as well (8) - the old code and the new tax code with which you want to replace it.
- Apart from scheduling the change to be automatic, you can also execute the policy manually - open the "EXECUTIONS" screen and click the "Execute" button.
In the same screen, you can check the execution status of the policy. It is executed regardless of whether the screen is open or not.
Clock POS
If you are a Clock POS user and you need to adjust the tax rate of the items you can:
- go to menu Management -> Menu Items
- click on show all so that the list with your menu items is loaded
- you can open the items one by one and change their tax %
- alternatively, you can select several items from the list, click on 'Edit Selected'
- enter the tax % for them (as long as all of them will have the same new tax rate) and click on 'Save and Close'
