Remove Sales Tax – by individual order or user

Hi @rebeccaolson,

There is no built-in way to do that with WooCommerce Services. We would recommend using our TaxJar extension instead:

* https://woocommerce.com/products/taxjar/

It is free, but you do require an account with TaxJar (this does have fees associated).

With that, you can set up customer extentions:

* https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/taxjar/#customer-taxability

I hope that helps!

Thanks Laurena – I looked into TaxJar, but it’s far more than our small business needs. Like I said, since I only need to do this once or twice a year, it doesn’t make sense to pay for the TaxJar service just for this purpose.

Since I cannot make this adjustment with Jetpack enabled, can anyone tell me if disabling the plugin in order to create the invoice without automatic tax, then re-enabling, will mess up the tax reporting somehow?

Thanks!
Rebecca

Hi Rebecca,

I just found out about a new product in our Marketplace that might do the trick!

* https://woocommerce.com/products/woocommerce-tax-exempt-plugin/

I’ve done some testing with it today, and it seems that it will work well with our WooCommerce Services automated testing. Maybe worth a look!

All of our products do have a 30-day refund policy, so it might be worth exploring.

Best,

We haven’t heard back from you in a while, so I’m going to mark this as resolved – if you have any further questions, you can start a new thread.

Etienne – unfortunately, this hasn’t been resolved. So far both options suggested require purchasing a plugin/subscription, which is not necessary for a very small online business with only one or two wholesale orders a year. Can you provide the appropriate place for me to suggest this as a feature? I’m unsure if it should be suggested to Woocommerce or Jetpack.

For others searching for this solution – I tried option #5 from my original post: (disabling automated tax calculation, entering and saving the order without tax, and then re-enabling automated tax calculation again) and unfortunately, my fears were well founded. It does remove the tax rates that have been populated previously, and there does not seem to be a way to recover the information. The only other workaround I can think of is to disable the Jetpack plugin, create and save the order, and then enabling the Jetpack plugin again. This would be very clunky – but presumably you don’t lose your database information when the plugin is deactivated (since deactivating plugins is standard WordPress protocol), so hopefully it will work.

Rebecca (@rebeccaolson),

I have the same issue for my small business. I may have a solution.

create a coupon code equal to the tax amount. For instance if sales tax equals 6% then you could create percentage discount coupon code that takes 6% off the total amount of the sale.

Here is an article explaining how to do so
https://wcom-help.icu/woocommerce-how-to-remove-tax-in-coupon-discount-2038/

Hope this helps!
Jesse

Thanks Jesse! That would definitely work for the customer to not get charged – but it would still show as a tax they paid on their receipt and in our reporting, and thus (legally) tax due in our accounts – essentially, since it’ll be on the receipt as being paid to us, we’d still be responsible for paying the tax to the state. It’s definitely a workaround so as not to upset the customers, but isn’t sustainable for us – since we’d still have to pay for the tax, that would be an additional 8.5% paid to the state on top of the revenue lost on the discounted wholesale price – we’d break even or lose money on these sales.

There needs to be a simpler option (like there is when “automated taxes” isn’t enabled) where you can elect not to calculate the tax, or a box you can check for “wholesale” that removes that line from the sale. In the meantime, I’ll just have to keep doing my clunky workaround. Thanks for the idea though!

I would be happy to request this as a feature, but as I stated above, I’m unsure if I should request it from Jetpack or Woocommerce. If anyone can direct me, I’d be grateful. Thanks!

Rebecca (@rebeccaolson),

We have a similar use case as you. We wrote a custom plugin to be able to mark certain customers (users) as wholesalers and as tax exempt. This prevents wholesalers from paying tax in the first place.

However, we ran into an issue where there are times where a wholesaler makes a purchase before we have a chance to mark them as a wholesaler. In this case they are charged tax when they shouldn’t be. And since we use taxjar for tax reporting and filing, we want to make sure the tax is not only refunded to the wholesaler but we need to prevent it from being reported to taxjar.

In our case, the order fulfillment can take days/weeks before we fulfill and the order is marked as completed in woocommerce. That is good for us since taxjar will not pull in the order until the order is set to completed.

I am under the impression (and here is a potential workaround for you) that you can edit the order in woocommerce to simply remove the tax up until the point where the order is set to completed in woocommerce. When viewing the order in woocommerce, hover over the line item and there will be a pencil icon. Click the pencil icon and you can edit the order and remove the tax. Again, I am under the impression this can only be done when the order status is not completed. However, I think you can switch it back to processing and make the edit if necessary.

Hopefully that can help you. Unless I am misunderstanding your use case, it should work.

Gar1 – Thank you so much! So sorry I just now saw this reply (the email from www.remarpro.com got sent to my junk mail.)

I didn’t see the option to edit the tax up at each product/shipping line item before, so I’m not sure if that’s an update since my original email, or if I somehow missed it in all my searching. But it works! Since I’ll be creating the wholesale orders in the back end anyway, I don’t have to worry about whether or not they’re already paid or completed – I just won’t create or save the initial order until the tax is deleted and everything looks good.

Thanks again! You’re a lifesaver.
Rebecca