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Sales Taxes


You can charge and collect sales taxes on the merchandise products you sell to your constituents.

Creating and managing sales taxes for one or more jurisdictions. This includes limited support for Value Added Tax (VAT) or Goods and Services Tax (GST).   The sales tax capabilities include:

  • Setting which individual products are taxable. 
  • Setting which accounts for tax-exempt constituent are exempted from sales tax.

In this section, you will find information and steps for sales tax configuration.

Additional Permissions

If Products include Sales Tax and a Staff Member modifies the billing address on an Account that has ordered at one or more of these products, the account trigger will attempts to update sales tax on cart items if the billing address of an account is changes. To ensure no errors are triggered, the following permissions need to be granted:

  • Read/Write Access On The Following Objects:
    • Carts
    • Cart Items
  • Read Access On The Following Object:
    • Sales Tax


Managing Sales Tax Records

  1. In the tab bar, click 
    App Launcher, or in Salesforce Classic, click 
    Nimble AMS, Staff View, Button, All Tabs.
  2. Click Entities.
  3. Select a list view—like All Active Entities—and click Go!
  4. Click the entity to which you want to add a sales tax.
  5. In the Sales Tax related list, click New Sales Tax

    External Sales Tax Added

    As of Winter '20 release of Nimble AMS, two record types of Sales Tax are added: Manual and External as Nimble AMS now supports sales tax across multiple levels in Advanced Taxation feature.

  6. In Sales Tax Name, enter the name of the sales tax option that is displayed in the Staff View order process. 
  7. Entity is populated with the name of the entity for which you are creating this sales tax.
  8. In Tax Rate, enter the tax rate.

    Example: The Virginia state sales tax rate is 5.3%; enter the tax rate as 5.3.

    External Sales Tax | Tax Rate Removed

    We have removed Tax Rate from External record type of Sales Tax as it is not required in this case. For creating a Manual record type, however, Tax Rate continues to be mandatory.

  9. If you are setting up a state tax rate, then in State, select a state and click Add.

    Press CTRL/CMD to select multiple states.

  10. If you are setting up a country tax rate, then in Country, enter the name of the country. 

    Ensure the name of the country matches the configured name of the country within your Salesforce org's State and Country picklist.

    Also, to use the same tax rate for multiple countries, create separate sales taxes for each.

  11. In Status, select Active.
  12. In Sales Tax GL Account, enter the name of the GL account and click 
    Nimble AMS, Staff View, Button, Lookup, and select GL account.
  13. Optionally, in Currency, select the right currency value.

    Note

    If you have enabled Salesforce multi-currency, Salesforce introduces the Currency field on all object layouts within your org.

    While creating a new Sales Tax record make sure to select the Currency field value that matches the Currency field value on the linked Entity and Sales tax record. If the Currency field value of the Entity and Sales tax record does not match, then it throws an error.

    Also, once the record is saved, you will not be allowed to edit the value of the Currency field.

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  14. Click Save.

Using Sales Tax

Two record types have been added to Sales Tax object as an association may require out of the two or both.

There are various scenarios in which associations might want to use both. Two of them are given below:

  • Scenario 1: US based association has majority of its business in a state where there are no hierarchical taxes applied and say just have a state level tax. In this case association can set up a manual sales tax record for those states to save a call to an External Tax System which will save cost.
  • Scenario 2: US based association has its business spread in two countries, US and Canada. Association is tax exempted in US Jurisdiction and needs to pay taxes in Canada. In this scenario, association can set up two sales taxes - a Manual sales tax with 0% tax rate for country as United States and an External sales tax with country as Canada. This will help in not calling Avalara where the ship to address is United States as it will apply Manual sales tax which will give $0 Tax amount. On the other hand if it is Canada then it will call Avalara to calculate the tax accurately as per Canada tax regulations.

In case External Sales Tax toggle is on, staff can apply both manual and external sales tax to the products. Whereas when this toggle is off, external sales tax cannot be applied tot he product.

How Sales Taxes Work in Staff View

Sales taxes are defined by creating sales tax records. On the sales tax record, you set the sales tax rate as a percent, where the tax applies, and what GL Account to use for recording the sales tax charged. 

Staff can determine which products are taxable by selecting Taxable under Financial Detail on the product. 

Staff can select Tax Exempt on a constituent's account so they will not be charged sales taxes. 

Within the Order Process

Staff can use the "How do you want to tax?" dialog box to select or override the Sales Tax Name for the sales tax used for the order item. The tax for a product calculates when the product is added to the cart and the Order Summary area displays the sales tax in the Tax & Shipping field. 

For merchandise product types, the constituent's Shipping Address is used to calculate the sales tax. If the constituent does not have a Shipping Address, the constituent's Billing Address is used to calculate the sales tax. 

The sales tax selected in the "How do you want to tax?" dialog box must be one associated with the same entity as the product(s) in the order item.

How Sales Taxes Work in Community Hub

The tax for a product calculates when the product is added to the cart. If there are taxable items in the cart, Total Tax is displayed on the Total Details card. If there are no taxable items in the cart at checkout, Total Tax is not displayed on the Total Details card. 

If a taxable item is removed from the cart or if the quantity of a taxable item is updated, Total Tax is updated to reflect the change.

When taxable products are also set as shippable, the Shipping Address card is displayed. If the constituent changes the shipping address and clicks Calculate Tax & Shipping, Total Tax is updated.  

How Sales Taxes Work in In-Person Events

For in-person events that are held in locations where event registrations are subject to taxes, such as a value added tax (VAT) or a goods and services taxes (GST), Nimble AMS can charge and collect the taxes from the event attendees.   

To charge tax on an event registration order item:

  • Create an appropriate sales tax, if one does not already exist. 
  • Set the event's location address with the correct location information. 
  • Select Taxable on the registration product that should be taxed.  

Your administrator can add Taxable to the Registration product page layout if it is not already visible.

The location address of the  event is used to calculate the sales tax. If the location address of the event is not set and any of its products are taxable, the constituent 's Shipping Address is used to calculate the sales tax. If the constituent does not have a Shipping Address, the constituent's Billing Address is used to calculate the sales tax. 

Things to Keep in Mind

Administrators should consider the following before configuring a sales tax. 

  • Nimble AMS does not support applying multiple sales taxes to a single product using the manual sales tax functionality. Using external sales tax system, multiple taxes can be taken into account and total tax calculated. This includes sales taxes that "piggy back" two or more taxes and are collected by a single jurisdiction but reported to multiple jurisdictions or other combined taxes, such as GST/PST or HST in Canada. 
  • A constituent's account that has Tax Exempt selected is exempt from all sales taxes that would otherwise apply. Nimble AMS does not support tax exemption based on the specific tax. 

    Note

    In External tax system, the tax exemption status of bill to person is considered for tax exemption purposes.

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