Setting up tax in Billkeep

Adding a rate

Settings → Tax rates and groups → New rate.

Name — what your customer should see on the document. “VAT 20%”, “GST”, “QST”.
Percentage — as precise as you like. 9.975% is stored as exactly 9.975%.
Tax-inclusive — on if the prices you type already contain this tax.
Compound — on if this tax is charged on a total that already includes another tax.

Tax-inclusive prices

With this on, typing 120.00 on a line at 20% means the customer pays 120.00, made up of 100.00 plus 20.00 of tax — rather than 120.00 plus 24.00. Net plus tax equals the price charged, exactly, with no penny left over.

Use it if you quote prices to the public with tax included, which is normal in much of the world for consumer work.

Compound tax

Leave this off unless your jurisdiction genuinely does it. Compound means the rate is applied to the subtotal plus the taxes worked out before it, rather than to the subtotal alone. Order matters, so compound rates are applied after the ordinary ones.

Groups: two taxes that travel together

New group bundles several rates into one choice on a line. The document still shows each rate separately, which is what the rules generally require, but on the invoice you pick one thing.

Typical shapes:

India — CGST 9% + SGST 9% as one group for local supply; IGST 18% as a separate one for interstate.
Canada — GST 5% + PST or QST as a group, with the provincial rate marked compound where the province works that way.
A single rate — perfectly fine on its own. A group is only needed when two apply at once.

Where rounding happens

Two settings, both in Settings → Your business, and both matter more than they look:

Round tax once per document — the tax is worked out across the whole invoice and rounded once, then handed back to the lines so they still add up. Common in the EU. With this off, each line's tax is rounded on its own.
Round the final total to the nearest… — for places where cash rounding is normal, such as to the nearest five cents.

Whichever combination you pick, the per-line figures always sum to the invoice total exactly. There is a test suite whose entire job is to fail if that stops being true.

Which rate applies is your decision

Billkeep ships no country's rules as truth, and says so on the totals screen. It does the arithmetic and keeps the record. Whether you should be registered, which rate covers what you sell, and when a return is due are questions for your tax authority or your accountant.

Setting a default

Most businesses use one rate for nearly everything. Set it as the default on your business and every new line starts with it, so the tax control becomes something you only touch for exceptions. A saved item can carry its own rate too, for anything that is always different.

Changing a rate later

Editing a rate changes future documents and open drafts. It does not change anything already finished — each finished document carries a frozen copy of its own breakdown, so a rate change in April cannot rewrite a return filed in January.

When a rate genuinely changes, the cleanest move is to stop using the old one and add a new one. Stopping one asks first and explains that finished documents keep theirs.

What you get at filing time

Settings → Totals, then a period. It reports tax charged by rate, read from each document's own frozen breakdown. Drafts, quotes and cancelled documents never count; credit notes subtract; everything is filtered to your one currency.

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