Tax

Tax is available on every plan, including the free trial. Charging a tax your government requires isn't a premium feature.

Turning tax on

1. Go to Settings → Tax.
2. Add a tax: give it a name (VAT, GST, Sales Tax — whatever it's called where you trade) and a rate, e.g. 7.5.
3. Choose whether your prices are tax inclusive or exclusive (see below).
4. Switch Charge tax on.

Until you do this, nothing changes: no tax is charged, and no tax fields appear anywhere in the app. Only the workspace owner and admins can change these settings.

Inclusive or exclusive pricing

This is the one decision that changes what your customer pays.

Exclusive adds tax on top. Inclusive leaves the ticket total exactly as it was and reports the tax that was already inside it — so switching an existing shop to inclusive doesn't change a single shelf price.

Which items get taxed

Tax applicability is decided when stock enters your inventory, not at the till — so your cashier never has to make a tax decision mid-sale.

• Every product has a Charge tax on this item toggle, on by default. Turn it off for tax-exempt goods.
• Products use your default tax automatically. If you've defined more than one tax, you can assign a specific one per product.
• These controls only appear while tax is switched on.

Selling

Nothing changes about how you sell. Add items to the cart and the tax appears as its own line — labelled with your tax's name and rate, like VAT (7.5%) — on the cart, the receipt, and the shared receipt link.

A basket can mix rates and exemptions: taxable and exempt items together, or two products on different taxes. Each is calculated on its own and the receipt shows one line per tax.

Discounts are handled before tax. An order-level discount is spread across the items in proportion to their value, so you never charge tax on money the customer didn't pay.

Tax is calculated on ScanLedger's servers from your own settings, not in the app on the counter — so web, mobile and the offline desktop till all charge exactly the same amount.

Manual receipts

Manual receipts have free-text lines rather than products, so a single tax applies to the whole receipt at your default rate. Each receipt has an exempt toggle for the times a customer or sale isn't taxable.

What tax does to your numbers

Tax you collect is money you hold for the government — it isn't revenue. ScanLedger reports it that way:

• Revenue is net of tax everywhere — your dashboard, sales summaries, Sales Insights and shift reports. Tax collected is reported separately.
• Bank reconciliation stays gross, on purpose. Your customer paid the tax-inclusive total and that's the figure that lands in your bank account, so that's what a deposit is matched against.

Tax paid on purchases

When you add stock from a scanned supplier invoice, ScanLedger reads the tax the supplier charged and records it against the items it created. The figure is split across the lines in proportion to their value, so what you paid always ties back to the invoice.

Extracted figures are shown for review but not editable — they're a record of what the supplier charged. If the document didn't state a tax amount, you can type one in.

The tax report

Dashboard → Accounting → Tax gives you the figure a return is built on:

• Tax collected — output tax from POS sales and manual receipts, broken down per tax.
• Tax paid — input tax from stock purchases.
• Net position — collected minus paid. Positive means you owe it; negative means you're in credit.

Filter by date range (this month, last month, this quarter, this year, or your own dates) and by store. Export to PDF, CSV or Excel for your accountant — exporting follows the same plan rules as every other export in ScanLedger, while viewing the report on screen is available on every plan.

Every figure comes from the rate each transaction was actually charged at, so changing a rate today never restates a period you've already filed.

Changing a rate later

Edit the rate in Settings → Tax. Completed sales keep the rate they were rung at — each one stores its own name, rate and amount — so a statutory rate change never rewrites your history or an already-printed receipt.

For the same reason, a tax that has already been charged can't be deleted. Deactivate it instead: it stops applying to new sales while past receipts stay readable.

Next steps

• Inventory — set which products are taxable.
• Point of Sale — how tax appears at the till.
• Bank reconciliation — why matching uses gross amounts.