Steersman’s Odoo TaxJar integration for sales tax look up and filing automation

Steersman developed a TaxJar sales tax integration for Odoo to enable lookups of tax rates and filing of sales tax reports in the United States. Our integration is TaxJar-certified.

The integration utilizes Odoo’s existing Fiscal Position functionality to determine which orders and customers would be routed via TaxJar. The TaxJar module in Odoo creates new taxes on an as-needed basis.

The sales tax integration has a number of configurations to allow changes without additional development.

TaxJar module global configurations

• Steersman’s TaxJar module for Odoo supports a setup with multiple TaxJar accounts – each account can be set up separately, or the same TaxJar account may be set up multiple times to process invoices differently for different customers, if such may be desired
• Set the integration to do tax calculations for quotes/orders
• Make Odoo submit invoices with taxes to TaxJar to process sales taxes via TaxJar, or leave it to do lookups only (to save on TaxJar API calls and file taxes outside of TaxJar)
• Set default bookkeeping accounts for sales tax records created in Odoo by the TaxJar module
• Set a global default “tax category” for products (can also override on product category level, and product level) – tax categories are synced to Odoo from TaxJar
• Nexus states are configured in TaxJar and sync back to Odoo

Odoo fiscal position configuration for use with TaxJar

• Odoo can be configured to look up sales taxes for some or all orders by configuring the fiscal positions
• Fiscal positions allow automatic detection based on delivery state or country of the order – use that to define whether TaxJar lookups would be applied. Fiscal position can also be manually set for a customer.
  • Can configure Odoo to have only orders going to some states to send to TaxJar, or can set all orders to go via TaxJar
• If an order gets a TaxJar fiscal position, then a sales tax will be looked up for it when the order is in quotation status; if the TaxJar configuration is set to submit invoices via TaxJar, then Odoo will send invoice details to TaxJar once the order invoice is validated

TaxJar settings on the customer level in Odoo

• A customer can be non-exempt or can be tax-exempt, with multiple flags (wholesale, government, exempt).
• In case a customer is tax-exempt in some states, it’s possible to enter just those states in the tax exemption configuration for the customer. Then the customer’s orders going to exempt states will be tax-free, while orders shipping to non-exempt states will be taxed normally, all based on the delivery address state.
• Exemption certificate and expiration date fields are available to enter the closest expiring certificate on file, and the certificate numbers can be entered comma-separated together for reference.

Additional sales tax functionality in the TaxJar module for Odoo

• When an order is created and a product is added to it, Odoo makes an API call to check the sales tax for products in the applicable sales tax product categories going to the destination selected. The rate received is cached, so if additional products are added and they are in the same tax category, no further tax lookup API calls are made for that order (for a limited time).
• If the TaxJar module is configured for full transaction synchronization, then invoices in Odoo are submitted to TaxJar upon validation, so cancelling an invoice in Odoo is not possible after it is submitted (must credit it to reverse in TaxJar reports).
• If an invoice fails to send to TaxJar for any reason (temporary service outage or other), such invoices are marked as not sent to TaxJar, and a button appears to re-send them manually.
• Tax records used for orders create sales tax records to allow creating basic tax reports in Odoo if needed.

Steersman’s TaxJar integration and other modules are included in our subscription-based Odoo services.