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Two markets where the tax question is about a place, and two different ways a schema fails to name one.
Everything difficult about tax in these two markets comes back to a single question: which jurisdiction was this sale taxed in? In the United States the answer follows the customer — sales tax is destination-based, set by a state and usually by a county or city under it, so the rate is a property of where delivery happened rather than of where the seller sits. There is no national rate to configure, and a system that models tax as one number per country models the United States as a fiction. In Canada the jurisdiction question arrives differently: a sale can carry a federal tax and a provincial one at the same time, owed to two governments, filed on two returns, with only one of them generally recoverable by a registered buyer — so the total being right is not the same as the record being usable. These guides work through both from the schema outwards, using our own as the specimen, and the findings are unflattering: our customer record holds a latitude to seven decimal places and has no field for the state, and our documents store a blended tax rate rather than the components that were computed to produce it. We do not calculate US sales tax at all, we do not file to the CRA, we have no payroll engine for either country, and we have no reference customer in either. What is here instead is a precise account of what would have to be built, which is more useful to a buyer than a capability list.
Not whether tax is supported — every system supports tax. Ask which field on the customer, and which field on the sale, carries the taxing jurisdiction. If the answer is the address line, ask what happens to the addresses that do not parse, and ask to watch one fail.
Where two taxes apply, each authority needs its own component. If the document stores a blended rate, those components have to be reconstructed from current settings — which works until a rate, a registration or a province changes, and then produces a confident wrong answer with nothing to indicate it. Test it by recovering last year's split without opening today's settings.
A resale or exemption certificate has an issuing state, an identifier and an expiry, and it is evidence you produce under audit for a period rather than an assertion about today. A boolean on a customer record cannot carry any of that — and it is worth confirming that whatever flag exists is actually read by the tax calculation, because in our product it is not.
Tax is two of these ten. AWRA OpsHub runs inventory, procurement, assets, sales, point of sale, HR and payroll, finance, projects, helpdesk and reporting as one system, and all ten work in every market — the presets below only decide what a rate field is pre-filled with. 2 of the ten have a guide written for North America; the rest point at the method guides, which hold wherever you run them.
No North America guide yet — read the method.
No North America guide yet — read the method.
No North America guide yet — read the method.
No North America guide yet — read the method.
No North America guide yet — read the method.
No North America guide yet — read the method.
No North America guide yet — read the method.
No North America guide yet — read the method.
These are the sales-tax presets AWRA OpsHub ships with, 2 of the 91 countries covered in total. They are headline national rates and a starting point for configuration — reduced, zero-rated and exempt categories still need setting up against your own chart of accounts, and rates change with each finance act.
| Market | Currency | Tax | Standard rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | USD US Dollar | SALES | 7% |
| Canada | CAD Canadian Dollar | GST | 5% |
Grouped into 2 topics, newest first within each.
US sales tax follows the customer. Our customer record holds a latitude to seven decimal places and no state field — and the question turns out to be asked in four places in our own code and answered from the organization every time.
Both are a percentage added at the till, which is where the resemblance ends. One is collected in stages and reclaimed; the other is collected once and avoided with a document. Software built for the first models the second incorrectly rather than incompletely.
Our engine computes each Canadian levy against its own base and hands back the breakdown. The document then stores a single blended rate and discards it — so the total is right and the split, which is the only thing either return needs, is gone.
We do not do US sales tax at all, and that is the first line rather than a footnote. Then what to ask everyone else, what to ignore, and the five things that should take us off your list.
Our table holds Canada at the federal rate, which is correct. It then writes that rate into an organization's own settings and never revisits the question — so a business in a harmonised province is configured at the federal figure and nothing says otherwise.
Five exclusions at the top, one of which rules us out of an entire province. Then the questions worth asking every vendor selling into a country where a sale can carry two taxes owed to two governments.
Each of these sets out what is built today and what is still on the roadmap for that market.
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