Auto-add service charge for delivery fulfillment

funessa — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 02:59:05 GMT

Hi all,

I'm a member of a nonprofit organization and we are hosting a liquor tasting event in the state of WA next month.

We want to allow our attendees to purchase liquor from their phones (using a Square website) during the event.

The challenge is... Washington state charges a separate "spirits liter tax" ($3.7708 per liter) in addition to the sales tax. (The spirits liter is a dollar amount, not a percentage.)

For the past 2+ weeks, I have been exploring how to have this separate liter tax automatically added to the online orders as a "service charge" but I cannot get it to work! (I was going to set mobile orders up as "delivery" orders and attendees could then pick up their purchases at the end of the night. I did this because I read somewhere that you CANNOT have service charges be automatically added to pick-up orders.)

The issue I'm running into is....

1) If the service charge is set to Non-taxed, you cannot select 'Apply automatically to online orders.'

2) If the service charge is set to Taxable - Apportioned taxes, you get an error message saying 'Service charges with apportioned taxes can not be applied to Website Orders or Square Invoices.'

3) If the service charge is set to Taxable - Assigned taxes, you have to select a tax rate (even though we DO NOT want this service charge taxed, since it technically is a tax), the option to select 'Apply automatically to online orders' is no longer greyed out BUT you get an error message saying 'A service charge cannot have assigned taxes and be applied to items at the same time. Please change the tax assignment or deselect all items.'

Are we dead in the water? Does Square not allow what we're looking to do?

Thanks in advance for your help!

thread Auto-add service charge for delivery fulfillment in Orders, Menu Items, Catalog & Fulfilment

Auto-add service charge for delivery fulfillment