Handling Uploaded Orders Exemption
Tax exemptions play a crucial role in ensuring the accuracy of sales tax calculations and compliance reporting. Whether you’re dealing with nonprofit organizations, resellers, or other tax-exempt entities, properly handling exemptions in uploaded orders is essential for maintaining audit readiness and avoiding overcollection or misreporting.
Customer Exemptions
If the order belongs to a customer with a valid exemption certificate, you need to explicitly indicate that in your upload. You have three ways to associate an exemption with the uploaded order:
1. Reference a Stored Certificate with exemptionId
If a certificate has already been created or uploaded and stored in TaxCloud, include the corresponding exemptionId in your order payload.
2. Let TaxCloud Auto-Match a Certificate
TaxCloud can automatically match a stored exemption certificate based on the customer’s ID and jurisdiction. To enable this:
- Omit the
exemptionID. - Still set
isExempt: true.
Important: Auto-matching works only if a valid exemption certificate already exists for the customer in the jurisdiction of the destination address.
3. Upload the Certificate After Order Creation
You may also upload the exemption certificate separately after the order has been created. In this case:
- Omit exemptionId in the order upload.
- Still set “isExempt”: true to ensure proper treatment during filing.
Once uploaded, the exemption will be applied to the exempted customer.
Additional Notes on Exemption Handling
- Always set isExempt: true when the order should be treated as exempt, regardless of whether you’re providing a certificate now or later.
- Ensure customer-level exemption settings are configured correctly in the TaxCloud dashboard or via the Exemptions API. A mismatch between the customer’s exemption profile and the uploaded order could result in the order being taxed inappropriately.
- For multi-state or partially exempt scenarios, ensure that the exemption certificate uploaded supports the destination jurisdiction.
Next Steps
Now that you’ve configured taxability and exemptions correctly for uploaded orders, the next step is to learn how to handle errors when uploading orders.