Taxes Setup

(Accessed through Maintenance / Park Setup / Taxes.)

The Taxes setup is a simple dialog showing entry for 5 tax rates.  For each rate, simply select a Transaction Category to use for it (each tax rate must have its own transaction category), enter the rate, and enter a description if desired (a description is optional, it's only seen on this dialog anyway).  Tax rates defined here are used for Rates and also for manually entering taxes on Transaction dialogs.

Important: The Category selected for Taxes should not be the category you'll use for the Charges.  Don't select "Daily Rate" or "Giftshop" as a tax category, for instance.  The Tax category should be a category only used for the tax itself, like "Sales Tax" or "GST".

By default, you may see a couple tax rates already defined when you set up your database.  Feel free to change these.  To delete a tax rate, simply change its category to be blank.  Then it will no longer show up wherever tax rates are used.

If you don't have a category set up for each tax rate you need to define, or if you want to rename them to reflect your local taxes, go to the Pick Lists and add appropriate Transaction Categories first.  The order or position of the categories in the Transaction Categories pick list doesn't matter.  These categories will allow you to create reports showing the amount of each tax collected, and will also allow the Transactions dialog to correctly calculate the tax.

Note that the tax rate is a multiplier, not a percentage.  Thus, 6.25% should be entered as .0625.  Any time the tax rate changes, just come back here to change the rate.

The "Default?" field in the tax definitions indicates which rate(s) may be selected by default when adding manual charges.  Note that this doesn't automatically determine the tax used (it can be changed if necessary when making the sale), it simply saves time when adding charges by pre-selecting the tax rates that may be applicable.

If the "Default?" option is checked, you can also click the corresponding Categories button select which Transaction Categories this tax should be the default for.  Thus you can specify that a Hotel Tax is the default for your site rental categories, and Sales Tax is the default for merchandise categories.  If multiple taxes apply to the same categories, that's fine -- just select the same categories for both.  Note that if no categories are selected, then it's assumed to be the default for ALL categories.

Important -- Once you set up Rates, never change the position of these tax categories.  This is because the Rates are defined as being taxable by tax rate number (1, 2, 3, 4 or 5), so if you switch them around then you will have to change every Rate definition.  This will also affect Point of Sale transactions and inventory items, so it's best to just never change the positions.