How sales tax routing works

For stores where you collect your own sales tax, TruSync uses your store’s own tax calculation for each order and tells QuickBooks not to recalculate it. Your store’s tax engine (whatever calculates tax at checkout) is treated as the source of truth for how much tax was collected.

Where that tax amount lands in your books is controlled by which QuickBooks tax rate you’ve mapped a jurisdiction to. Each QuickBooks tax rate belongs to a tax agency, and the agency owns the liability account it posts to — TruSync doesn’t set a liability account directly, it routes through the tax rate you’ve mapped.

This is why mapping jurisdictions to tax rates (in Settings → Sales Tax) matters: it’s not just a formality, it’s what determines which agency and account the money is tracked against.

When an order’s tax jurisdictions are mapped in Settings → Sales Tax, TruSync sends QuickBooks the tax broken out by jurisdiction, each part tied to the QuickBooks tax rate you mapped. The total tax on the document is still the amount your store calculated.

This matters most for QuickBooks files that use global tax, such as Australian or UK files. In those files QuickBooks only records tax that is tied to a tax rate, so the mapping is what makes the tax appear on the document at all.

If no mapped tax rate applies to an order, TruSync sends just the total tax amount, without a breakdown by rate.

QuickBooks has its own automated tax calculation feature. Turning it on for a TruSync-connected store would duplicate what your store’s own tax engine already did, and can produce incorrect returns. TruSync explicitly tells QuickBooks not to recalculate tax on the orders it posts — automated calculation isn’t needed and shouldn’t be enabled.

If your QuickBooks company’s home currency isn’t USD (for example an Australian file on GST), TruSync looks up the QuickBooks tax code that carries the tax rate you mapped in Settings → Sales Tax and puts that code on the taxed lines. This applies to the documents TruSync creates and updates, including refunds and credit memos.

Without it, QuickBooks rejects a document from these files with “Make sure all your transactions have a GST rate before you save.” If TruSync can’t read your tax codes, it falls back to its generic tax marker, which is what US files use.

On these files QuickBooks also refuses a document that charges tax on some lines unless every line carries a tax code. So when an order mixes taxable and tax-free items (or has tax-free shipping, or a free gift), the tax-free lines need a zero-rate code of their own.

Which zero-rate code is your decision. Codes such as GST free and Out of Scope are both 0%, but they are reported differently on a BAS or VAT return, so TruSync doesn’t choose one for you. Choose it under Tax-free items in Settings → Sales Tax (or in the Sales Tax step of setup), or ask Trudy to list your options. Until it’s chosen, an order that needs it is held with a QuickBooks Error that tells you so, and you press Retry once you’ve chosen. An order with no tax-free line never needs it.

US QuickBooks files don’t have this setting. QuickBooks decides the tax code on each line itself from the item’s own tax status, and TruSync leaves it alone.

Amazon and eBay orders post with zero tax, since the marketplace already collected and remitted it as a facilitator — there’s nothing for TruSync or QuickBooks to route. Refunds and cancellations on those orders also carry zero tax.

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