Setting up Taxes

Setting up taxes and tax rates is one of the first tasks you want to perform when setting up a store. Taxes can be complex, but ProfilePress aims to make the setup as straightforward as possible.

The team at ProfilePress can help with setting up tax rates in the ProfilePress settings and how the platform handles taxes/VAT/GST based on these settings, but not when or what to charge.

We’re not tax professionals so our advice is how to use our software. For specific advice when it comes to what or when to charge tax/VAT/GST etc, we recommend consulting with a tax professional or an accountant on what may be your best options.

Each business is unique, and there’s no way we can cover every possibility.

Collecting Taxes

To access the tax settings screens, they first need to be enabled. Go to ProfilePress > Settings > Payments >> Taxes. Select the Enable Taxes checkbox.

Select whether to charge tax inclusive or exclusive of tax and whether to charge tax based on the customer’s billing address or your shop address as defined in Business Info settings.

EU VAT Setup

If your business is based in the European Union (EU), you can enable the EU VAT setting to automatically charge VAT or taxes based on the customer’s base country.

Note that you don’t have to set up the VAT rate for each EU country, as the rates are already included in ProfilePress. We ensure the rates are up to date, so you don’t have to worry.

If the EU customer provides their VAT number, it will be validated via the EU VIES online service. If the VAT number is considered valid, they won’t be charged VAT.

Use the “Disable VAT Number Validation” setting to disable VAT Number validation by VIES online service. Doing this will consider any VAT ID supplied by the customer as valid.

Use the “Same Country Rule” setting to decide when to charge VAT if a customer is from the same country as your business.

To customize the VAT label shown on the checkout page, use the “VAT Number Field Label” setting.

Setting Up Tax Rates

This section allows you to set up tax rates for every country you want to charge tax. All you need do is add the country and specify the specific state to target. If you want to charge every region or state, ensure you check “Apply to whole country.”

Remember I mentioned we automatically have the VAT rate for EU countries set up for you. If you want to set the rate of specific countries with your custom tax rate, set it up for the countries, which will override our plugin.

Finally, you can set a fallback rate to charge customers of countries with no defined rate.