thread Re: Default Tax Rate on New Inventory Items in Payments Troubleshooting

Default Tax Rate on New Inventory Items

lennys26 — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 19:07:11 GMT

I have 5 different tax rates defined. When I create any new item, the system automatically adds them all to the item which makes extra work as I then need to remove all but the one which actually applies.

Is there no way to select a default tax rate that should [initially] be applied to new items?

Re: Default Tax Rate on New Inventory Items

TheRealChipA — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 11:59:12 GMT

Hey there, @lennys26. I have an idea that should work, but it comes with some weirdness when setting it up for the first time. In order not to cause you a lot of work, can you tell me a couple of things?

How many items do you currently have in your item catalog?
Do all, or most, of those current items use the default tax rate?
Can you please explain how different items can have different tax rates? Tax rates are meant to be geographically based, and in most jurisdictions sales tax rates are the same for all sales. I’m confused about why, exactly, you are doing this, and wondering if there might be a better solution.

Thanks,

Re: Default Tax Rate on New Inventory Items

lennys26 — Sun, 13 Oct 2024 19:11:39 GMT

Hi @TheRealChipA

I have about 700 items. I am in Spain where we have 4 tax rates for supermarket items depending on the item - 21%, 10%, 7.5% and 2%. Most items fall under the 10% rate but a significant amount do not. Complicating things, these rates recently changed from 21%, 10%, 5% and 0%. For reporting purposes I needed to leave the old rates in the system, which means that at the moment there are 6 rates configured.

It is a real pain having to unselect 5 tax rates every time I create a new item, and it seems that there should be a way to set a default, but I cant find it.

Re: Default Tax Rate on New Inventory Items

TheRealChipA — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 11:27:50 GMT

@lennys26 That makes sense. My apologies for not noticing Span’s flag next to your name. If I had, I would have suspected that this was a more localized question, rather than a general one. First, have you tried posting in Spain’s Seller Community to see how more local sellers handle this issue? It seems that this should be a good resource. I can’t imagine that anyone here in the US community can help because your taxing structure is so different that any that we have here in the states.

I can see where the ability to apply taxes by category (or another grouping) could be extremely helpful. But this would be a feature request that you would have to submit on the Ideate Board. I did some looking around and found nothing that would help streamline this using any bulk editing or bulk actions, unfortunately.

Anyway, since Square is in Spain there must be a way to do this and hopefully that Community can help you.

Re: Default Tax Rate on New Inventory Items

Shanetir — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 17:42:44 GMT

This is the same in Ireland. Please please, pretty please fix.

We use 3 different VAT rates based on the type of food (0%, 13.5% & 23%).

The bigger issue for us is that it is easy to forget to untick the other tax rates. Also there are several users who can create new products.

As a result you can end up overpaying taxes by a huge amount. Potentially 36.5% (13.5 + 23) instead of 0%.

There are no products in ireland with more than 1 tax rate so I dont understand why new products would default to "All Taxes".

I love Square but this drives me bananas.