Configuring the Taxes tab
It can seem complex to figure out how to configure your membership site to collect taxes. But good news! We've worked hard to ensure that getting set up to collect taxes is as easy and straightforward as possible in MemberPress. To collect taxes with your sales in MemberPress, you'll want to go to MemberPress > Settings > Taxes to get started.
Video Overview
In this video, you'll learn how to enable tax calculations on your
Tax Options
There are several options you can choose from to set up taxes on your website after you first enable tax calculations:
Prices Entered With Tax
This option will help MemberPress determine whether the prices you specify for your memberships are exclusive or inclusive of tax.
If exclusive is selected, the customer will pay the price of the membership plus the cost of any applicable tax, but if inclusive is selected, the customer will pay just the price of the membership, which includes any applicable tax.
Let's say you had a $10 Membership "exclusive" of tax, and the tax rate the customer should be charged is 5%. The customer would then pay $10.50 total for their Membership ($10 base membership + $0.50 tax).
Now let's say you had the same $10 Membership "inclusive" of tax with the same tax rate of 5% for the customer. The customer would then pay $10 total for their Membership ($9.52 base membership + $0.48 tax).
Calculate Tax Based On
This will determine whether tax should be calculated based on the address that the customer enters or on the merchant address you entered in MemberPress > Settings > Info. IMPORTANT NOTE: if you select to calculate taxes based on the merchant's address (which is your address in most cases), please note that you need to enter the country and state codes for your address instead of writing them out. For example, if you are from Alabama in the United States, you would enter AL for the state and US for the country. If you are from Alberta, Canada, then you would enter AB for the state and CA for the country.
Default Address
This option will enable you to specify a default customer address that can be used as the taxable address.
If there is no address set for the customer, MemberPress can either use the merchant address to calculate the tax or use no address at all, which would result in no tax being applied to the sale.
Tax Rates
MemberPress has some great options for determining the tax rate given your location or that of the customer. Currently, MemberPress supports two automatic solutions for determining tax rates and one for uploading your own custom rates.
TaxJar Integration (Pro Only)
NOTE: This integration is available to MemberPress Pro users only.
Once TaxJar is activated, MemberPress searches TaxJar for tax rates when the user checks out. Then after an order completes (and if the order had tax), it pushes the payment information to TaxJar for reporting.
- To get started setting up MemberPress with TaxJar, you will first want to create an account with TaxJar by going to taxjar.com.
- Once logged in, you will go to Account > State Nexus Settings. You will need to set up your States in TaxJar, where you have a sales Nexus (meaning you owe taxes there). When adding the state, there's a checkbox you need to use to tell it whether or not the API should calculate taxes for that location. You will almost always want that box checked.
- Next, you will want to go to Account > SmartCalcs API in TaxJar so that you can get your API key, which is called SmartCalcs.
- Once you have your API key from TaxJar, login to your WordPress dashboard and go to MemberPress > Settings > Taxes tab and enable TaxJar. You will then be able to enter your API key in the box provided. Click update, and you are all set.
VAT Tax
MemberPress offers full VAT tax support, including the new rules that went into effect in January of 2015, as well as the latest changes introduced by some EU countries as of January 2020. All you need to do is enable it and select the country of the VAT MOSS that you report to. Once this is done, MemberPress will calculate and collect VAT taxes on any of your sales coming in from all of the nations in the EU. For more information, please see this page.
Custom Tax Rates
MemberPress also allows you to upload and fully manage your own custom tax rates. Please note that when VAT taxes are enabled, any custom tax rates you define in this table for EU countries will be ignored, and the proper VAT rates will be used instead.
Each custom tax rate has the following attributes:
You can leave Country Code, State Code, ZIP/Postcode, or City blank (*) to apply the rate to any value.
For example: to apply the same rate for all of the US you would do country code "US" and leave the state code, zip/postcode, and city blank.
- Country Code – 2 digit country code for the rate. Use ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes. Leave blank (*) to apply to all countries.
- State Code – 2 digit state code for the rate. See the state files located in
i18n/states/for supported states. For the US, use a 2 digit abbreviation (e.g. AL for Alabama). Leave blank (*) to apply to all states. - ZIP/Postcode – Enter postcodes for the rate – you may separate multiple values with a semi-colon (;), use wildcards to match several postcodes (e.g. PE* would match all postcodes starting with PE), and you may use numeric ranges (e.g. 2000-3000). Leave blank (*) to apply to all postcodes.
- City – Semi-colon separated list of cities for the rate. Leave blank (*) to apply to all cities.
- Rate % – Enter the tax rate, for example, 20.000 for a tax rate of 20%.
- Tax Name – Name your tax, e.g. US State Tax.
- Priority – This field is currently not used in MemberPress. If you need to have multiple taxes, they should be combined together.
Once your tax rates are uploaded, you can export your tax rates to a CSV file, delete individual tax rates, and clear all the tax rates. You can always upload additional tax rates from other, properly formatted CSV files.
Importing and Exporting Custom Rates
There is an export button within the table that you can use to export a CSV of your input rates.
There is also an import function that you can use to import a CSV. The CSV requires 6 columns:
country code, state code, postcodes, city, rate, tax name
And optionally an additional column:
priority
If omitted or blank, priority will default to 1.
Here's an example of a CSV file for California state taxes (Note: the rates in this file aren't guaranteed to be accurate):
If you're looking for accurate, up-to-date tax rate CSV files, you can find them at taxrates.com. You'll need to modify files downloaded from taxrates.com, but they're easily modified for importing into MemberPress.
NOTE: If you're having any issues with importing CSV files created with Microsoft Excel 2011, please try creating your file using Google Sheets, and save it as a CSV file. Then try the upload process again.
Deleting Custom Tax Rates
It's easy to delete a single custom tax rate by clicking the "x" next to each tax rate and to clear all tax rates by clicking the "Clear Tax Rates" button underneath the tax rates table.
Viewing Tax Reports
You can now access reports and CSV downloads in MemberPress > Reports that will clearly inform you how much tax has been collected.
You can view or download your tax collected per day, month, and the year overall or by the product. In addition, you can download your VAT tax collected by transactions or separated by country.
Showing taxes on the registration page
If you would like to have the tax amount shown on the registration page, you can enable the "Enable Single Page Checkout Invoice" setting in the MemberPress > Settings > Account tab. You will need to be running MemberPress version 1.8.7 or newer for this option to appear.
Video: How to Make a Membership Tax Exempt
Video: How to Make a Membership Tax Exempt In this video, you'll see how to not charge taxes on individual memberships. You can do this per membership by going to
MemberPress > Memberships and clicking to edit a membership.
Then under Membership Options > Registration tab, enable "This Membership is Tax Exempt."