A practical checklist for tax calculation

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Run through this the next time tax calculation comes up.

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

The checklist

• Rules differ by destination and change without warning
• Getting it wrong is a compliance problem, not just an accounting one
• Automate it rather than maintaining tables by hand
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

Why it matters

Rules differ by destination and change without warning. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

In practice

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. Three things worth confirming about tax calculation before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Automate it rather than maintaining tables by hand — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.