Sales tax
Sales tax lives in two places, and it helps to know which does what. Settings → Finances → Taxes holds the rates you charge. Settings → Company → General → Defaults › Tax controls whether tax shows up at all and what happens by default.
Rates here are presets you confirm — not tax advice. Verify your jurisdiction’s current rates with your tax agency or accountant. Nobody at LawnLedger knows what your county did last quarter.
The Taxes tab needs admin. If you connected QuickBooks and left books in QuickBooks mode, QuickBooks remains the tax authority — the rates here are display defaults and QB can overwrite the tax on a synced document.
Building a rate
A rate is the total you charge, broken into the jurisdictions that make it up. Break it out even though the customer only sees the total — the components are what you’ll need when you file.
Settings → Finances → Taxes → Add rate
Name it after the place, not the number
Travis County 8.25% beats Rate 1. You will have several.
Add a component per jurisdiction
Component name and Component rate — State, County, City. They sum to the rate applied on documents, shown as Total.
Set one as the default
Use as the organization default. It’s applied when neither the property nor the customer has a rate of their own.
Which rate a document uses
First match wins, top to bottom:
- A rate picked directly on the estimate or invoice
- The property’s rate
- The customer’s rate
- Your organization default
- If you have no rate tables at all, the flat percentage from Defaults › Tax
Property beats customer on purpose. Sales tax generally follows where the work happens, not where the bill is sent — a customer in one county with a rental across the line owes the rate for the address you mowed.
Rates freeze when a document goes out
Editing a rate only affects future documents. An invoice you already issued keeps the rate it was issued with, along with the component breakdown.
That’s deliberate. If a rate change rewrote history, last quarter’s filed numbers would silently stop matching the invoices behind them. While a document is still a draft it recalculates; once you send it, the tax is fixed.
What you owe
Settings → Finances → Taxes → Tax liability & remittances, or Reports → Sales tax liability. It shows what you collected per jurisdiction and lets you record a payment to an agency, so the next period starts from a true balance.
Tips
- Tax is always added on top, never extracted from your price. If you want a customer’s total to land on a round number, set the line price so that price + tax gets you there. There is no tax-inclusive mode.
- Mark exempt services exempt on the service, not per document. Services → the service → Taxable. Doing it per document means remembering every time.
- A customer with a resale or exemption certificate gets their rate cleared on the customer record, not on each invoice.
Troubleshooting
Tax isn’t showing on documents at all. Check Defaults › Tax → Charge sales tax. It gates the whole tax line.
The wrong rate keeps appearing. Walk the list above in order. Nine times in ten it’s a rate sitting on the property that someone forgot about.
Tax changed after a QuickBooks sync. Expected in QuickBooks books mode — QB is the authority there and writes its own tax back.