Hello All,
I’ve run into an issue regarding sales tax, and I’m hoping y’all can help me.
We’re using Commerce Hub Pro, love the new quote template and the quick creation editing. However, I’m not a loving the new mechanism for Sales Tax.
Here’s my dilemmea:
I can add tax rates to the library, which is a HUGE amount of work given that we serve the entire US and the number of rates (given state, county, city taxes) I’d have to add would be astronomically large.
Or, I can activate automated tax rates. The problem here is that it only works if you include a payment link with the quote, which we don’t do.
I would rather not create a simple line item for Sales Tax, but that sounds like the only solution right now.
This feels like a significant problem for Commerce Hub Pro. How do you all get around it? Or, perhaps I’m missing something and there’s a simple solution.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Best Regards,
-James
Hey @JamesFuimaono,
Welcome to the Community!
To start, it looks like automated sales tax is actually built to work on quotes. Our doc on the matter walks through the setup here: Set up automated tax and tax rates.
Additionally, you may find this existing topic helpful: [Public Beta] Automated Sales Tax Collection with Commerce Hub.
I’d also like to tag in some of our Top Contributors to see if they’have any experience with this:
Hey @danmoyle**,** @GiantFocal, @SteveHTM – Do you have any suggestions for @JamesFuimaono on handling this just in Quotes specificially? Did you find any limitations that require utilizing payment links as well?
Thanks in advance!
Sam, Community Manager
Hi @JamesFuimaono. I think the simplest idea to start with to try and solve this that I’ve seen is to add a manual sales tax line item. This is what I’ve seen a couple clients do when they don’t use payment links:
- Create a generic product called “Sales Tax” in your Product Library
- When creating a quote, add this as a line item
- Manually enter the tax amount based on the customer’s location
- Apply a tax rate from your library if you want it to show properly
Pros: Works immediately, tax shows on PDF
Con: Requires manual calculation per customer
I think you could also do a lite version of the library instead of adding every US rate (state + county + city). So you’d create a smaller set that might look like this:
- Add state-level rates only
- Set a default tax rate that auto-applies to line items
- Then manually adjust per quote if county/city taxes matter for specific customers
The good news is that it’s much less work than “astronomically large” full breakdown. However, it’s still slightly inaccurate for high-precision compliance. Best case for now is to look into an integration with a third party tool. There are some in the Marketplace, but I’m not an expert in any of those.
So it’s not a you thing, this is a known limitation. The automated tax feature was released in beta last August and is designed primarily for businesses using those payment links/invoices with checkout. For quote-only workflows without payments, manual entry seems to continue to be the standard approach.
Thank you Sam.
To my embarrassment, the automated sales tax wasn’t calculating because we have multiple line items for shipping, and the automation requires just one line item for shipping. Once I fixed that issue, sales tax is now calculating properly.
Thank you for the speedy reply and for reaching out to others that could point me in the right direction!
Thank you Dan! These were all very helpful.
The line item was indeed my first solution, though neither our sales team nor our finance team loved that. I contemplated the library lite version and then changing the line item label to “estimated sales tax” giving us some wiggle room.
In the end, it turns out I needed to make some changes to how we handle shipping. The automated sales tax calculation doesn’t work if you have multiple line items for shipping and we did. Once I changed that, automated sales tax calculations worked just fine. So, it was a bit of a false alarm here.
Thank you for taking the time to post a reply. 
That’s great to here @JamesFuimaono! I’m glad you found your solution. And always happy to offer ideas and perspective to help our community. Cheers!