Depending on your location, you may need to charge sales or other taxes when providing services to your clients. This article will help you get tax rates set up correctly in your Ignition account.

If your business does not need to charge tax, then you can skip the content below.

First, navigate to Settings → Taxes. On this page you can:

If you are located in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa or the UK, then we will have already created a local sales tax rate for you, which you should see here.

If you need to add one or more additional tax rates you can do so by clicking Add New Tax within the "Tax Rates" section.

Note that you don't need to add all tax rates that may be applicable to your business, just those that you may need to use when quoting or invoicing your clients.

It's currently not possible to rename or remove tax rates after they're added to your account. Make sure to only add tax rates that you're going to use when invoicing clients, as this will make it easier to manage tax rates in your Ignition account.

Next, choose a default tax rate for your account. This should be the tax rate that you'll most commonly use.

When you add new services to Ignition, they will use this tax rate by default.

There are two settings which control how tax is displayed to your clients - Sales Tax Display and Sales Tax Label.

Use Sales Tax Display to control whether you want to quote prices to your clients including or excluding tax.

It's also possible to choose No Tax Display - in which case your client won't see any indication of whether prices are tax-inclusive or tax-exclusive.

Here's a quick example of how tax-inclusive prices are displayed on a proposal:

And here's an example of a proposal showing tax-exclusive prices:

Note: When you are setting your prices, you will need to enter in the price exclusive of tax at both the service level and proposal level.
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This means that if you want to display tax-inclusive prices, you will need to pre-calculate the amount to the nearest decimal point. 

You may also want to customize the way taxes are described to clients, depending on your location. For example, in the UK you may want to use "VAT" or in Australia "GST".

This can be done by choosing your own Sales Tax Label. As an example, if we set the sales tax label to "HST", then the client will see prices presented like this on their proposal:

When you connect Xero or QuickBooks to Ignition, you'll need to map tax rates in the accounting ledger to tax rates in Ignition. This allows Ignition to apply the correct tax rates when invoices are created in your ledger.

You'll only have to map tax rates that have been added in Ignition, not all the rates in the ledger.

When you connect a new Xero or QuickBooks account, you must supply a tax mapping for each tax rate in Ignition.

To connect a new ledger account, go to Apps in the left-hand menu and click on the Xero or QuickBooks tile. For more detailed instructions, refer to one of these articles:

Normally your tax rate mapping won't need adjustment once it's been made. However if you do need to alter it, you can do so by going to Apps in the left-hand menu. Click on the tile for your connected ledger, and then go to "Tax Rate Mappings" under "App Settings".

In Ignition, tax rates are linked to services. When you add services to a proposal, the tax rate linked to each service will be automatically selected. You can change to a different rate within the proposal if you need to.

Your services will inherit the account-wide default tax rate that you choose on the tax settings page (see above). You should only need to modify services that won't be using your account-wide default rate.

To customize the tax rate used for a service, navigate to your Services in the left-hand menu.

Open the service you'd like to alter. You can select the rate to use for this service under "Tax Rate".

When you add a service to a proposal, the tax rate linked to the service will be selected automatically. However, you can change the rate used within the proposal if you wish.

Simply enable View tax rates → click on the Tax Rate dropdown on the service to select another rate.