Can you specify tax for a payment via Payment API?

Questions
1

Hello!

We are trying to specify taxes based on locationId for the transactions happening for our business. We’ve specified a Sales Tax rule and can retrieve it via the Catalogue API

From our research it doesn’t seem like you can specify a tax rate on Payments via the Payments API. The only place we’ve found it’s possible to create a tax rate is via the Orders API. We’re trying to avoid creating Orders to avoid any potential rate limiting we may run into in addition to our back-off strategy.

I wanted to confirm whether our understanding is correct here. :slight_smile:

The other alternative we’ve found is creating a catalogue for every item that our business sells and specifying Sales Tax rules per location. Current our business does not have items, so from the looks of it the rules do not get applied as they’re not tied to an item, even if the location matches:

  • [..] apply the tax to ALL ITEMS IN YOUR LIBRARY [..]

Thank you in advance!

2

:wave: You’re understanding is correct. Currently, taxes can only be applied to order prior to payment processing. If you have the recommended backoff strategy you should very rarely run into rate limiting given that we recommend creating an order then paying for the order. :slightly_smiling_face:

5

@Bryan-Square

As it’s 2025 now, may i know whether it’s still unavailable to specify tax via payment API? = )

The background is that we want to use Mobile Payment SDK together with Square reader and stand in offline mode, as it’s offline, it may not be possible for our application to create an order with tax before creating the payment, how should we resolve this situation?

Thanks.

6

@Bryan-Square

Any suggestion is appreciated, we are blocked by this issue for now :sweat_smile:

Thanks.

7

When in offline and the payment is pushed to Square we will use the tax that’s configured in the Dashboard. :slight_smile:

8

@Bryan-Square

Thanks for replying.
Just would like to confirm whether my understanding is correct on the payment tax, in addition to your reply:

  1. Square API: we must create order with tax first, then create payment for the order, so that the tax can be applied on the payment amount;

  2. Mobile payment sdk + online mode: the same as Square API above;

  3. Mobile payment sdk + offline mode: we just need to create local payment, without order (we can’t create it in offline mode), afterwards when the local payment is pushed to square, the tax configured in square dashboard will be applied to the payment automatically;

9

Yes, that’s correct. :slight_smile:

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