About Taxes
Billings is designed to meet the tax requirements of almost any country or other tax jurisdiction, and comes with basic tax set ups for more than 120 regions. Taxes are applied on a per-slip basis, so that you can mix and match taxed and tax-free items on a single invoice.
Taxes are defined in the Taxes pane of Billings Preferences. There are two kinds of taxes: a) Regular taxes, which have a name, a rate, and can have a registration number to be shown on invoices, and b) Consolidated taxes, which are groups of regular taxes. Regular taxes can either be ordinary or compound.
When applying taxes to a slip, you choose from a list that includes the regular taxes, and any consolidated tax groups.
To better understand how this works, consider the example of Ontario, a Canadian province. In Ontario, there are generally two taxes that may be applied to products and services:
- GST (6%)
- PST (8%)
Sometimes, Billings users in Ontario need to charge one tax or the other, but very often they need to charge both at the same time. So, Billings has a consolidated tax:
- GST + PST
The consolidated tax tells Billings to first apply GST at 6%, then PST at 8%, for a total of 14% tax on the slip.
You can set up as many different taxes as you need, and combine them into consolidated tax groups if you need to charge more than one tax at a time. When you send invoices, the taxes are separated appropriately and each is given its own line item with a total for that tax.
You can also save tax set ups, to share with other Billings users, or to back up old tax information if the governing body in your country or tax jurisdiction changes a tax rate.