How Tax Exemption Works at the Register

This changed recently. The "Tax Exempt?" checkbox and the "Tax Exemption" button have both been removed from the register. If you've been trained to tick a box, you don't need to any more — and there's nothing left to forget to untick.

How it works now

Tax exemption is a property of the customer, not of the sale.

Attach a customer who is set up as a reseller and the sale becomes tax-exempt immediately. TAX drops to $0.00, the customer button shows TAX EXEMPT next to their name, and you'll see:

Tax exemption applied - Jane Smith

Remove the customer and tax is charged again on the next refresh.

That's the whole mechanism. There is no manual override, in either direction.

Making a customer tax-exempt

You can't do it from the register. A customer is marked as a reseller in the Customers screen under Admin. Once that flag is set, every sale you attach them to is exempt automatically.

If you attach a customer expecting exemption and it doesn't apply, they aren't flagged as a reseller yet.

Why the checkbox went away

Two reasons.

It could disagree with what the sale actually charged. The box was a setting in your browser; the tax that got charged was worked out on the server. Nothing kept the two in step.

It carried over between sales. Because the register never reloads between customers, an exemption switched on for one sale could still be on for the next one — meaning a following sale could be rung up tax-free by accident. That is fixed: exemption is now worked out fresh from the customer on the sale, every single time, and a sale with no customer is never exempt.

What is not affected

Individual products can still be marked tax-exempt in inventory, and those lines carry no tax regardless of the customer. Layaway lines, rent payments and gift card sales are also always tax-free. See Understanding the Totals Panel and Dual Pricing.

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