How should I set up taxes in Onsight for the United States?

US sales tax is unusually complex — every state, and often every county within a state, can have a different rate, and some products are tax-exempt in ways that vary by jurisdiction. Because of this, Onsight recommends customer taxes for the US rather than product taxes: each customer is assigned a tax rate based on their state and county, and any tax-exempt products are simply marked as non-taxable so they’re excluded regardless of the customer’s rate.

If you use one of the Onsight connectors that connect to your ERP or accounting system (eg. QuickBooks, Zoho, Zero, 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 thousands of county-level tax rates 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: given the sheer number of US counties, manually maintaining a tax rate per customer usually isn’t practical. Instead, we recommend turning tax calculation off in Onsight entirely and letting your accounting system calculate and apply tax when the invoice is created there. To do this:

Log in to the Onsight web console at https://sales.onsightapp.com/.
Click on ‘Settings’ from the left-hand side menu.
Click on the ‘Configuration’ menu item.
See your present configuration settings in the General tab.
Click the ‘Edit’ button.
Find the ‘Tax settings’ section.
Turn off ‘Charge Taxes’.
Click the ‘Save’ button.

If you do want to charge tax within Onsight (for example, if you’re not using a connector but still want tax shown on orders/quotes), set up customer taxes:

Follow the steps in How do I set up customer taxes? to enable customer taxes.
Create a tax rate for each state/county combination you sell into — see How do I add a new tax?.
Assign the correct tax to each customer, 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.