sales tax reports by state & county

[AstralAcc]

Hi in order to file & pay sales taxes correctly I need to be able to identify sales that ship to another state, by county and state shipped to.  Is there a way to do that?  Ideally I need a report that shows sales, taxes etc. for each state & county.  thanks!

[Candlestore · Accepted solution]

@AstralAcc ;

Did you try the export at https://squareup.com/dashboard/sales/reports/taxes from your Square Dashboard on a computer.  I get my State and other Municipalities taxes for my state listed there.  Not sure if that would show your taxes for other states.  As most states do not require Taxes collected on out of state sales.   I did see some state are trying to get taxes collect on items purchased out of state.  My online stores site does show what Items and the $ amounts shipped out of state but since currently I do not have to pay taxes on items out of state, these just show $0.00 for those taxes collected or charged.  The other thing you may have to do is look at your Online sites information and reports.  How were these sales made, online or Phone orders to be shipped out of state?  Wherever you create your web page at if they were online sales I would look for reports there.  

[Candlestore]

@pammm ;

May I ask how is a Small business suppose to know all taxes for locations they ship to?  That does sound insane on your States Part.  Is that within your state or out of state sales also? 

How do you know the sales tax rates for where you ship to if it is on the other side of the country?  Also how do you know if that area charges State, County, City taxes and what all those rates are for where a package goes.

[pammm]

I only have to pay and report taxes for my state, California. To do this nonsense, I had to:

• download my detailed sales report from square 
• sort by state
• delete anything that is not California 
• sort by city name 
• add a column for county
• look up county for each city and enter on spreadsheet 
• manually total sales tax collected for each city (the total per sale is on the report)
• Enter these totals in online reporting portal for CA sales tax. Line. By. Line. 
  realize the numbers do not add up because the rates collected by square are not equivalent to the rates set by the state. 
• spend hours on phone with square and the state.
• give up and alter numbers to overpay your taxes because you’ve dealt with this nonsense for two weeks and don’t care anymore. 

I made 8k last year. I shudder to think what other larger businesses do or how I’ll do this as I grow. 

[Amyeichlerart]

This makes me happy (still upset... but happy 🙂 to see that there's not an easier way.  I do about the same as you...

1. export transactions 

2. copy and paste into my monthly spreadsheet (that's filled with excel formulas and a tax chart for my 50 most frequent cities/counties)

3. manually fill in cities based on memory, cross referencing the order report, or manually looking up invoices

4. based on my excel formulas and prefilled tax chart, note if the tax charged is not what should have been charged (look up if the destination is outside the city limits, or was just charged incorrectly, which happens too often)

The issue is all in the online sales... in-person show up correctly in the sales tax report, but all online sales are lumped into the state... so it's a useless report.

The only thing that has saved me time is using a formula-filled excel document that calculates and lists the tax rate charged on each order AND auto-populates totals in a sales tax chart I created based on city/county and then totals the sales tax that 'should' have been collected (which should match Square's "sales tax" column total).  

I make a full time living off my business and have thought the same as you for years... what do larger businesses do?  If you've found an easier way, definitely share!

[AstralAcc]

Hi unfortunately no resolution for getting county info within my state, which is my issue.  It could be my set up though.  My issue is mostly for when I sell at markets.  I first tried creating separate locations but that creates inventory issues so I’m kind of stumped except to do manually and keep track of my sales manually by market.

[user12345]

I don't understand why this is showing as solved. We have the same issue and it's a nightmare

[Candlestore]

On a computer if you goto Reports>Reports> Taxes

Here is a Link if you sign into your Square Dashboard in a chrome Browser:

https://app.squareup.com/dashboard/sales/reports/taxes 

You would get the below image: 

[Amyeichlerart]

Thanks Keith! But the issue is that the top line lumps all the online sales under the state sales tax and doesn’t break it down by city/county. Manually added sales taxes used for in-person sales are fine, it’s all the online sales that aren’t  broken down in reports. 

[Candlestore]

@Amyeichlerart ;

I did not know this was an Online Issue only, as I do not use the Square Online sites or weebly for my Website.  Currently my state only charges Sales Tax for in State Taxes and when we ship to other states we currently have no report to even see this.  I only get the above example when we do Phone orders within my state when we use the Square Pos for phone orders.  I was under the impression they did this to Ship To in the Point Of Sale sales to Match the Online taxes.  Because I questioned why I was seeing all these different Counties and Tax districts when it first happened to me. 

Since I see you use Excel with a formula filled Spreedsheet and copy paste figures in manually, could you download the csv file from Square to a folder on your desktop, open your xlsx workbook and then use Powerquery to perform all the calculations and import your newly downloaded sheet to automatically do your calculations for you.

So after having the PowerQuery setup:

1. Download csv from Square to Folder
2. Move csv from Downloads to replace previous csv
3. Open xlsx workbook
4. Click a cell, then right click Refresh all data
5. Figures are recalculated and replaced in the spreedsheet

No copy paste or other human errors and saves time.  I did this when I wanted to merge Squares Transactions Items csv with Squares Transactions Details csv files.  I now do this at the end of every year so I have a Spread sheet of All my items, customers, Quantities and sales data.  This then adds the current year to the previous years so I can see which items are my top sellers for a year and which ones to get rid of.  Squares reports are good for This year and Last year but not to compare Quickly for the last 5 years for example.  PowerQuery is great when you do repetitive things like what you have setup. 

[Amyeichlerart]

The issue is Square doesn’t provide a report of the sales tax (city/county) that was charged for online sales. So while an automated system could perform what you’re mentioning, there would still be need for manual look ups.

For example, a product shipped to an address outside the city limits would have no city sales tax applied even though that city would show up in the delivery address column. How would you recommend dealing with these (quite common) situations? If square would provide a report breaking down the rates charged, even if the city/county wasn’t listed, it would make an automated system so much easier. 

[Candlestore]

@Amyeichlerart ;

Try contacting the State or States for a Table of these different Rates.  The using the automated version I mentioned.  Have it connect to the states File to get the most recent and accurate numbers.  Square is not a Tax autority or Tax software and rules are always changing.  If the State wants these numbers they should give these to you to do this correctly.

Using PowerQuery (automated system) you can have it connect to Websites to get Table Data off of the website too.   I believe Google sheets can do this too.

The problem is the States come up with we want More money through Taxes, but then do not notify Business owners how to get this information on what the new tax rates are for all the areas they now want YOU to collect these taxes for.   Get the state to give these files and make them accessible for automation.

[Amyeichlerart]

Got it. I think we are talking about different things.

I know how to find the tax rate for the delivery address. That’s not an issue. My state makes that easy. Square Online knows how to find that rate too. Since Square uses a system that looks up and applies the rate based on the delivery address, it would be nice if that info (the rate they are applying) was included in a sales tax report. 

That’s all we (everyone in this thread) are asking for. It has nothing to do with Square being a tax expert, we as small businesses handle the taxes. They simply need to keep up with the standards of other e-commerce businesses and update the sales tax reports with the data that’s already in their hands. It’s easily possible. 

Sales tax reports for in-person sales are so easy and straightforward. I wish online sales didn’t complicate it so much, but here we are. 

[user12345]

we have the same issue. nightmare as well.

[claycoyote]

It's 2025, has anyone figured this out? I'm in Minnesota. Just ran my January report, I have 37 sales all in different taxing districts. The good news is Square charged the customer the right amount of tax, the unfortunate part is that they don't show their work. Somehow they know how much to charge ... that means the data is in there, we just need to extract it. -Making pots in Minnesota 

[pammm]

Nope. They still haven’t responded this. You have to download a detailed item order report, remove the things that aren’t relevant, then use what’s left to extract info for each city, like by line.  I’m doing my sales tax reporting late because of how many orders I had last year and am looking to change platforms as my business grows. I find it appalling that a California based company isn’t setup to help California based customers do their reporting. It’s ridiculous and really basic coding that would probably take them a couple of hours to do. 

[ScottSecondLove]

Wow +1 to all the small biz owners here dealing with this madness. I use square POS and square online and compiling every quarter tax information is CRAZY! Basically like others have said my terminal is broken down into the correct physical city and county since I manually configured the tax there but the auto sales tax collection from online sales where we ship just lumps into a state "Washington" in my case. It's wild that there isn't a backend db that can filter the city/county tax and even rate used for a lump of transactions. Square you guys have to do something about this- it cannot be THAT difficult to reference on a report. Even if you just do it by city that should help to transfer over into state-based tax inputs.