How should I set up taxes in Onsight for Canada?

Canada’s sales tax varies by province: there’s a federal GST (5%), HST in five provinces (which replaces GST with a combined rate), provincial retail sales tax in BC, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, and Quebec’s own QST. Which Onsight tax setup you should use depends on how many provinces you sell into.

If you use one of the Onsight connectors that connect to your ERP or accounting system (eg. QuickBooks, Zoho, Xero, NetSuite or SAP B1), the connector can automatically import and keep each customer’s correct tax rate in sync with your accounting system, so you don’t have to maintain a tax rate per province by hand. In this case, once the connector is set up, customer tax rates are handled for you.

If you don’t use one of these connectors, you’ll need to set up and assign taxes manually in Onsight using either customer taxes or product taxes, depending on how many provinces you sell into.

If you sell across multiple provinces with different tax rates, use customer taxes: each customer is assigned a tax rate based on their province, and any tax-exempt products are simply marked as non-taxable so they’re excluded regardless of the customer’s rate.

Follow the steps in How do I set up customer taxes? to enable customer taxes.
Create a tax rate for each province you sell into (eg. GST, HST, PST, QST) — see How do I add a new tax?.
Assign the correct tax to each customer based on their province, either individually or via the ‘Is Taxable’ and ‘Applied Taxes’ columns in the customer bulk upload sheet — see How do I bulk upload my customer data?.
Mark any tax-exempt products as non-taxable on the product record.

If you sell in only one province, or in multiple provinces that share identical tax rates, use product taxes instead: set up the province’s tax rate(s) and assign them to each product, with some products using a zero or exempt rate where applicable.

Follow the steps in How do I set up product taxes? to enable product taxes.
Create the tax rate(s) that apply in your province — see How do I add a new tax?.
Assign the correct tax to each product using the ‘Taxable’ and ‘Applied Taxes’ fields on the product record — see How do I add and update products?.