This one causes more re-pricing work than any other setup decision, because it is invisible until the first bill and then it is everywhere: every menu, every price card, every printed insert.
The two conventions
In most of Europe and in Australia, the price a consumer sees is the price they pay — tax is inside it. In the United States, the shelf price is generally exclusive and sales tax is added at checkout, which is why an American guest is unsurprised by a total that does not match the menu and a European guest is annoyed by it.
Neither is more correct. What matters is that you follow the convention of the country you are actually trading in, and in several places it is not a convention at all but a legal requirement about how you display prices to consumers.
What the system holds
Three things are configured per store, not hard-coded:
The tax name. VAT, GST, SST, IVA, consumption tax, or a local tax that is not a national one at all. The name printed on the receipt should be the name your tax authority uses — a receipt that says the wrong thing is a problem in an inspection even when the arithmetic is right.
The rate, and more than one of them. Plenty of countries tax food and alcohol differently, or dine-in and takeaway differently. Tax belongs to the dish, not to the bill, so a single ticket can carry two rates and the bill splits them out correctly. If it were a bill-level setting, a table ordering both food and beer would be wrong every time.
Inclusive or added. The switch that decides whether the menu number already contains the tax.
Currency is configured alongside — symbol, decimal places, and rounding. Decimal places are a real setting rather than a fixed two: some currencies use three, some use none and round to the nearest note, and a system that assumes two decimals produces change nobody can hand over.
What we will not tell you
Whether you should charge a service charge, whether it is taxable, whether your country requires a certified fiscal device or a real-time submission to the tax authority, or how to file. Those differ sharply by country, change often, and are the sort of thing where a confident wrong answer costs you money.
What we will do is confirm, before you buy, what the system supports in your specific country — we have real fiscal integrations in some markets and not in others, and we would rather lose the sale than promise one we do not have. Tell us where the shop is.
For the tax and compliance background on opening a shop in a specific country, our sister site yunyafx.com covers it in more depth. For anything you will actually file, use a local accountant.
