# 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.