Sales tax: you decide what is taxable, not us

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

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.

If you are in Canada

Everything above works the same way, with different words on the authorities. You enter GST (5%) as a federal rate, or HST as a single federal rate if you are in a province that harmonised — Ontario at 13%, Nova Scotia at 14%, and New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador and Prince Edward Island at 15%. HST is the federal and provincial portions collected as one rate on one return, so it is one row, not two.

Where the province charges its own tax alongside GST, that is a second provincial rate: British Columbia at 7%, Manitoba at 7%, Saskatchewan at 6%, and Quebec's QST at 9.975%. Alberta, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut and Yukon have no provincial sales tax, so those shops enter GST alone. We do not fill these in for you, and that is deliberate — a rate we seeded in 2026 and nobody revisited is a wrong number you would bill from. Nova Scotia moved from 15% to 14%; check today's rates with your accountant and enter them once.

Nothing compounds. GST and PST are each charged on the pre-tax amount, so $1,000 of work in British Columbia is $50 of GST and $70 of PST, never $73.50. Quebec used to be the exception — QST was levied on the GST-included price — and stopped on 1 January 2013, which is exactly why the rate is the odd-looking 9.975%.

The property's location decides the tax, not yours and not your customer's. Work on a dock is a service in relation to real property, and those are supplied where the property sits. That is the same postal-code stack described above, so a shop working two provinces enters a group for each.

The report gives you what you collected, which is not what you owe. GST and HST are value-added taxes: you remit what you collected minus your input tax credits on what you bought, and LakeOps never sees your purchases. The GST/HST figure here is the collected side of your return — line 105 — and your accountant subtracts the credits.

QST works the same way. A registered Quebec business claims input tax refunds on the QST it paid on its own purchases, so the QST line here is also a collected figure rather than an amount owing. The provincial taxes in British Columbia, Manitoba and Saskatchewan are retail sales taxes rather than value-added ones, so they generally have no equivalent claim — but what a shop may recover there varies, and it is a question for your accountant rather than for us. Whichever province you are in, do not pay from the total on this page.

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.

That includes Stripe Tax, which Stripe may offer while you set up LakeOps Payments. LakeOps never asks Stripe to add tax to a payment. The amount on the pay page is the price with your tax already in it, so a customer is never taxed twice.