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Taxes

Taxes

Spectre POS uses WooCommerce's tax engine. During onboarding, Spectre auto-fills tax rates for your country and region so you don't start from zero. After that you can adjust them under WooCommerce → Settings → Tax.

How rates are pre-filled

When you complete step 1 of the onboarding wizard (Store Details), Spectre looks at the country, state/province, postcode, and city you entered, and inserts the appropriate rates as WooCommerce tax rows. Examples of what's filled in:

  • United States — your state's base sales tax (e.g. CA 7.25%, TX 6.25%). Where local jurisdictions add their own tax, Spectre looks the local rate up and adds it.
  • Canada — HST, GST + PST, or QST depending on the province (e.g. ON 13% HST, BC 5% GST + 7% PST).
  • EU and UK — the country's standard VAT rate (e.g. DE 19%, GB 20%).

Rates are cached for 90 days per (country, state, postcode, city) combination so re-running the lookup is fast.

Review and adjust

After onboarding, go to WooCommerce → Settings → Tax to see what was pre-filled.

You'll find three tabs:

  • Tax options — global settings like prices entered with/without tax, tax based on shipping vs billing address, and rounding.
  • Standard rates — the rate table Spectre pre-filled. Each row has country code, state, postcode, city, rate %, name, priority, compound flag, and tax class.
  • Reduced-rate / Zero-rate — additional tax classes if you sell items that are taxed differently (e.g. some apparel or food items in certain jurisdictions).

You can edit, delete, or add rows by hand. Use Insert row to add a new rate; click any cell to edit it; tick a row and Remove selected rows to delete.

Common adjustments

  • Wrong state rate. Edit the row in the Standard rates table.
  • Missing local tax for a city. Insert a new row matching your city's postcode and rate. Mark it compound if it stacks on top of the state rate.
  • Tax-exempt customers. Create a customer in WooCommerce and tick Tax exempt on their profile, or assign them a zero-rate tax class on individual orders.
  • Different rates for different products. Set the Tax class on each product under Products → (edit) → General → Tax class, and add matching rates under that class's tab.

Tax on POS sales

The same WooCommerce tax rules apply to POS sales:

  • The tax is calculated from the shipping address by default (or billing, depending on what you picked under Tax options).
  • Walk-in sales without a customer use your store address as the calculation basis.
  • The total in the checkout modal already includes tax, so the cashier and customer see the final amount.

Tips

  • After changing rates, verify on a test sale that the total looks right before ringing real customers.
  • If you operate in multiple states or provinces, you'll have multiple rows in the Standard rates table — one per region.
  • Tax law changes; the rates Spectre pre-fills are current at onboarding but not auto-updated. Review them when local rules change.
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