How to Set Up Tax Reports

With the latest update to Report Toaster, you may have noticed our new tax reports over in the left-hand menu: 

These reports are designed to help you narrow down your Shopify sales by state, country or city (based on either billing or shipping locations), making it much easier to report your sales tax accordingly. 

Note - these reports require a paid subscription for Report Toaster to access. Visit https://reporttoaster.cloudlab.com/subscribe to sign up today. 

This article will therefore cover how to setup your tax reports in Report Toaster, as well as how to customize them to suit the tax requirements for your individual business.

Note - Most merchants would agree that taxes are not fun. Feel free to reach out to us (via the details at the bottom) and we'll be happy to work with you to get the data that you need :) 

Let's begin!

Taxes by Jurisdiction

First of all, we'll start off with the taxes by jurisdiction report. This report is designed to help you break down all sales and taxes withheld by the corresponding jurisdictions.

The breakdown for each of these columns is as follows: 

1. Title - The name of the tax jurisdiction for which tax was withheld.
   
2. Rate - The tax rate for that particular jurisdiction.
   
3. Order Tax Lines - The number of taxable orders for that jurisdiction.
   
4. Price - The amount of tax withheld.
   
5. Net Sales - The taxable sales for the jurisdiction. Note that many tax authorities will ask for the gross sales (which to them means the amount collected, not including taxes). This is equivalent to the Net Sales field in Shopify.
   
6. Shipping - The amount charged for shipping on taxable sales. Some tax jurisdictions require tax to be collected on shipping charges. In this case, the Net Sales and Shipping columns would need to be added together to represent all taxable sales.
   

Note that as with any of our reports, you can customize this data however you like. For instance, you could... 

- Introduce a filter. Filters are an amazing way to narrow down the subset of data. These are a great option if you want to narrow down your options to only a certain subset of data.

To do this, click the filter, choose what you want to filter on based on the different dropdowns, and select your options accordingly. E.g. if I wanted to only see my Sales that applied to the state of New York, I could do something like this: 

 

Note - The full range of Shipping Address details is available here (including city, country, and even ZIP codes). You can also use Billing Address details if you prefer. To learn more about filters, click here.

- Change the columns. Every column in this report can be changed at your discretion. This is a great idea if you plan on exporting this report (see here) and want to make you life easier when copying and pasting the data to another application.

Alternatively, there may be data fields you do/don't need on this report. Either way, click on the columns button (top right) and drag/drop the items from left to right to change which ones display on the report. 

 

To learn more about adjusting columns on a report, check our main guide here.

- Adjust the date range - Depending on your filing period, you might want to take a look at your data for the last 30 days, the last quarter, or even last year. 

All of these options are available on the top right. In addition, you can also choose between whether you want the data compiled into a summary, or broken down by Daily, Weekly, Monthly etc. 

To learn more about adjusting the date range on a report, check our main guide here.

Sort the Data - Finally, you may want to change how you want the data sorted. This is good if you want the data to perhaps be more readable, or because you want to prioritize the higher amounts first. 

You can do this by clicking through the arrows at the top of each column. E.g. Support, I wanted to sort by Jurisdiction Alphabetically (descending), then by rate (descending high to low). 

To learn more about changing the sort on a report, check our main guide here.

Monthly Taxable and Non-Taxable Sales 

These are essentially the same report but each uses a different filter - one shows only your taxable sales, while the other shows only your non-taxable sales. 

In both cases, this report is designed to provide a high-level summary of your Sales volume, telling you the number of orders, Net Sales, Shipping and Taxes (if applicable) for the defined period. 

The Taxable Sales report is most useful when you need a high level overview of your taxable sales numbers to report to states for which you have nexus.

Conversely, some jurisdictions require non-taxed sales to be reported, so that's when the Non-Taxable Sales report would come in handy.

By default, the report is set to Year-to-Date and Monthly. You can however any of the filters (1), columns (2), date ranges (3) or sorting (4) following the procedure described in the section above.

 

 

Tax Lines 

Finally, this report gives you the most granular view possible by providing the tax details on an order by order basis.

Most of the time, your tax reporting obligations will focus on the total amounts, so we would typically recommend using the Taxes by Jurisdiction or Taxable/Non-Taxable Sales reports respectively. However, this report is useful if you are looking at the details for a specific order, or want to troubleshoot where you think the numbers aren't matching your expectations.  

By default, the report is set to the Last 30 Days. You can however any of the filters (1), columns (2), date ranges (3) or sorting (4) following the procedure described in the sections above.

Conclusion

Hopefully this gives you a solid overview of how to setup Tax reports inside Report Toaster.

Once you have your reports setup and customized the way you like them, you can save them to your My Reports for further use, export the data for use in other applications, or even setup Scheduled Reports to get regular deliveries of this data on an ongoing basis. 

These are just a few of the ways you can make life easier for yourself when gathering data for your taxes. But if you would like assistance with setting up your tax reports or understanding the data, we're always here to help!

Feel free to reach out to us at support@cloudlab.com or via the LiveChat in the app :) 

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