Sales tax: you decide what is taxable, not us
LakeOps does not know whether dock work is taxable where you are and never guesses: you enter one rate per authority that taxes you, group those into the stack that applies at an address, and tick which of your own services the tax applies to — because that answer is a legal question about your business.
LakeOps never decides what is taxable. Whether installing a dock is a taxable service or an exempt improvement to real property is a genuine legal question with a different answer in most states, and it is your business and your accountant's call. So LakeOps does no guessing at all: you enter the rates, you say which of your services they apply to, and the software does the arithmetic and the paperwork. A confident wrong answer would be worse than no answer.
Nothing here is on until you switch it on. Every service starts as not taxable, so no account begins charging tax because a feature shipped.
One rate per authority
A rate is one taxing authority's rate — your state's, your county's, your city's, a transit or stadium district. Each one gets its own entry, with its own registration number, because each one is remitted separately on its own return.
Resist the urge to enter one combined figure. "7.375%" cannot be split back into 4% plus 2.375% plus 1% afterwards — the sum does not tell you the parts, and the parts are what you file.
A property is taxed by a stack
Collect the authorities that tax one area into a group, and list the postal codes it covers. A property matches the group by its postal code, and the whole stack applies.
Where a postal code straddles a boundary — it happens, and your accountant will know where — set the group directly on the property instead. That choice wins outright and nothing recalculates it later.
Which of your services are taxable
A checkbox on each service. Off unless you tick it, and off is not an opinion about your state's law — it is LakeOps declining to have one.
When a property has no jurisdiction
A taxable job at an address no group covers finishes without a price, rather than being taxed at zero. Taxing at zero would be the software quietly deciding the work was exempt. An unpriced job is visible and fixable in an afternoon; tax you failed to collect is discovered by an auditor two years later.
The job itself is fine — the work is recorded, the items are ticked off, nothing is lost. Add the missing group and price it again. The tax settings page warns you about postal codes on your properties that no group covers, so you can find them before a crew finishes one. A group with no rates in it counts as no cover for the same reason.
The rate is locked to the job, forever
Tax is worked out the moment a job closes and every component rate is stamped onto it. Change a rate next season and finished work is untouched. "Why was I charged that in March" is answered by opening the job, not by rerunning anything.
The return
The sales tax report groups by authority, never by group — a group is how you configure a property, not something anybody files with, and the same state rate can sit in several of them. It gives you tax charged and tax collected side by side, because states differ on which basis you file, and it exports to CSV.
It also tells you what it excluded: completed work that carried no tax because the service was not marked taxable. The first thing an accountant asks about a return is what is not on it.
A cent, occasionally
Each authority's tax is rounded on its own, because each one is filed on its own and each line has to be exact. On a small job the components can therefore add up to a cent either side of what the combined rate would give. That is correct, not a bug — the alternative is rounding the total once and splitting it back, which makes every authority's figure an estimate.
What LakeOps does not do
There is no automatic tax lookup and no third-party tax service. Those charge a fee on every transaction and assume every shop wants to be registered somewhere on their behalf. Your rates are yours, entered once, and they cost nothing.
Still stuck? Ask us — or go back to the help center.