Tax Shifting setup

Tax Rates

Tax shifting is an extremely complex setup, as a starting point we recommend checking with your finance/accountant to what should or shouldn’t be shifted and what code you want it shifting to.

The GPOS system can not handle a “Hot and Cold” scenario as once a tax level is shifted to then the products applicable in that scope are set to that tax rate. The only way to do this would be “duplicated” products which handle the hot or cold element on the tax. If someone shifted to “Non VAT” and bought a cold sandwich and then bought a warm pasty then the pasty would need to be not tax shiftable so it stays on “Std VAT” and doesn’t become “non VAT”. Tax shiftable flags are covered below.

Inside Total Control the first change you want to make is to the tax levels, to do this if you go to “General Databases- Other- Tax Rates”.

As you can see above I have a list of the common known tax levels and then some additional levels.

It is possible to have more than 1 of the same level and can often be useful for a tax shifting scenario.

If you edit a tax level and select “pos options” from the dropdown in the edit screen then you get to the following screen:

Here we see the options for the shifting of that tax level. In my setup I have my Std Vat level shift into the Exempt level; an example of when this would be used is during a Eat in/Takeaway scenario in a university, the student sale being exempt.

The “Shift Stay down for Tran” should be set to true to allow the shift to stay for the rest of the transaction from the moment it is pressed.

The “Tax Symbol” is shown in reports and for user reference.

“Shift Requires Manager” allows every shift on this level to have a “manager required” flag, therefore only a clerk with manager authority can allow a tax shift on that level.

When shifting the tax levels it has to cascade down, the shifting cant go up. You can’t have tax level 4 (Exempt) shift back up to 1 (Std VAT) and so what we have to do is create additional tax levels like above to cascade into. An example of this would be Std VAT (1) – Exempt (4) - Std VAT (6).

Macro Creation

Once you have established which tax levels should cascade into others and what you want to do within the scope you then need to create a macro to do that for you.

As you can see below I have created a macro which will shift my tax for a student sale.

Like above you will need a system key number in there which relates to the tax level and then a system key for “tax shift” so GPOS knows to shift whatever is on level 1 to the next tax level.

You can have multiple shifts going on inside a macro.

In the above I have Std shifting to Exempt and then Sandwich/milk VAT also shifting to exempt, to which it goes to the homepage.

We recommend having an initial page setup for the shift options (macros), something that when clerks sign in it goes to or the till defaults to; that way it forces the clerks to make an option on that sale.

Enabling Tax shifting on the product.

The product has to be on a tax level which has a shift in it, as well as this the product need to have the “Is Tax Shiftable” flag setting on it.

To enable this option go to “general databases- Products” and then edit the product and select “pos options”. In the general tab you will see below:

Setting the flag to “true” will allow that product to be shifted to different tax levels based on its default tax code.

Please note that the system can only shift if the flag is set, if the tax code on the product has a level to shifts to and if the macro has the tax shift in it with the tax code number of your product.

An example of this would be the Large Latte below; this is on tax code 1 (Std VAT) and a student wants to buy it, I press the “Student” macro which shifts anything on tax code 1 to be tax code 4 (for the transaction) and makes the sale VAT exempt. During this sale if I put through a Non VAT item and the macro didn’t have a shift in it for non VAT and just “1 – Tax shift” then the non VAT item will stay non VAT for the duration of the sale.