To view your sales tax collected for a certain time period, run the following report:
Filter:
Filter on the date you would like to see (eg. last month)
Group:
Location >> Name
Metrics:
Source Sales >> Net Sales
Sales Tax >> Net Amount Collected
If your tax rate is x% and all of your items are taxable, then it stands to reason that your sales tax collected should be x% of your total sales. However, if you are seeing that your tax is not equalling x% of your sales, this is most likely because not all items you sold were taxed at your tax rate of x%.
Why is my sales tax collected not the % I would have expected of net sales?
If your sales tax collected does not match what you expect based on your total sales, there are three possible explanations:
Your tax rule was not active at the time of sale.
Some items sold were exempted from your tax rule. This could include non-inventoried items such as a shipping charge, or it could be that the customer who made the purchase had a tax-exempt status.
A manual tax adjustment was made at the time of sale.
If you see that your tax amount collected is off, below are examples of two methods you can use to investigate this unexpected difference.
(1) Report on net sales and sales tax collected, by ticket
You can run this report and then export this report into excel and calculate what percent the sales tax collected is of the net sales for each ticket to see which ticket has less or more tax collected than expected (or X%). You can then investigate those tickets where the collected tax is not at the rate you expected them to be.
Filter:
Filter on the date with the sales you would like to see
Group:
Sales Transaction >> Ticket Number
Metrics:
Source Sales >> Net Sales
Sales Tax >> Net Amount Collected
Options:
Remove Subtotals
Include Grand Total
(2) Check for items or customers that are exempted from your Tax Rules
First, go to Settings >> Tax to find your Tax Rules. Click into each one to see what items or customers are exempt from each one. Then build a report, as described below, to find which transactions contain the affected customers or items.
If you determine that you have both items and customers that are exempted from your tax rules, you should build a separate report for each.
Filter:
Filter on the date with the sales you would like to see
Items: Filter for any items that are exempted from your Tax Rules.
Customers: Filter for any customers exempted from your Tax Rules.
Group:
Sales Transaction >> Ticket Number
Item #
Item >> Description
Metrics:
Source Sales >> Net Sales
Source Sales >> Net Qty Sold
Options:
Remove Subtotals
Include Grand Total
Note: It is possible that an item falls within your tax rules today, but was exempted for some reason at the time of sale. The easiest way to determine what taxes applied to a given transaction is to open the ticket record (Sales >> Tickets) and look at the Lines tab. All tax charged will be reflected there, along with the name of the applicable Tax Rule.