thread Re: Sales tax recording/calculating by temporary location in Payments Troubleshooting

Sales tax recording/calculating by temporary location

rickszat — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 19:37:28 GMT

We are an art business selling original art at local art shows, etc. By design, these are 1-2 day "pop-up" type events. We are not selling online at this time.

As each event occurs in a different city or taxing location, is there a way to set the location & tax rate per event or have the system select the correct location/taxation? We just completed our first ever event on Saturday 04/13/24 and have another event May 9th in a different location. Since we price our products as tax included to make cash transactions simpler, I need to be able to calculate tax for sales on 04/13/24 at one rate and on 05/09/24 at another.

Any guidance would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Re: Sales tax recording/calculating by temporary location

JK_Fiber_Art — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 21:14:12 GMT

Hi Rickszat,

It's possible to setup different locations with different tax rates however, it may be more trouble than it's worth. One issue is once a location has been created, it can’t be deleted. However, it can be deactivated. For most businesses, they are not changing locations however, for people who do events in different cities, that may be a challenge as you're going to accumulate quite a few locations. In the past we were vendors at various events and markets through out the year and did exactly as you did, we included the Tax in the price. We priced our art accordingly and manually figured out the appropriate taxes later. For us this worked well and really didn't take a lot of time. Just my thoughts of course, hopefully some other volunteer Community Members have some thoughts.

Re: Sales tax recording/calculating by temporary location

rickszat — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 21:19:13 GMT

Thanks for the quick response. I'll check this method out.

Re: Sales tax recording/calculating by temporary location

Candlestore — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 23:28:27 GMT

@rickszat ;

Do you know the Different Tax Rates for the areas before you get to the event? Meaning do you know the Tax rate now for the May event ?

So my Local Tax is 6% So I can have a Tax Rate of PA at 6%

And a Tax Rate of 6.625% for NJ.

In the Sales tax settings area you could make a list of the areas you go to with their corresponding Rates.

Then before going to your new tax rate area, download your Square Catalog and put a Y in the Tax Column of the area you will be seling in. then upload your catalog. This is better than Choosing the corect Tax rate per item in your Dashboard.

Here is more on Tax rates and how to set them up, The last part is about Square setting these for you, but that is a gamble to hope it is all setup correctly and that your items are not configured with Delawares 0% for some reason (testing or Wholesale etc).

Link for setting up Tax Rates: 5061-create-and-manage-your-tax-settings

The other thing to watch for depending on what your are selling is some states Tax items that another area does not charge sales tax for.