Looking for the best WooCommerce tax plugins to help you accurately calculate sales tax or VAT at your WooCommerce store?
Collecting and filing sales tax definitely isn’t a fun part of running a WooCommerce store, but it is important to keep your store on the right side of the law and avoid nasty surprises when it comes time to file taxes.
Thankfully, there are some great plugins and services that can help you calculate taxes on WooCommerce. And, depending on the service, they might even be able to help you with your filing responsibilities, too, either by filing for you or giving you access to the reports that you need to streamline the process.
In this post, we’ll look at the six best WooCommerce tax plugins, most of which are focused on either the USA/North America or the EU. Unfortunately, I couldn’t really find any popular plugins that offer deep support for other regions.
Let’s dig in!
Six Best WooCommerce Tax Plugins in 2021
Here are our picks for the best tax plugins for WooCommerce…
1. Official WooCommerce Tax Services
WooCommerce Tax is the official extension from Automattic for automatic tax calculations. It’s powered by Jetpack and currently supports over 30 different countries. The big-name countries are as follows:
- United States of America
- Canada
- Australia
- United Kingdom
- Germany
- France
- Spain
It also includes a number of other European countries. Again, the current number is over 30 countries in total. The official service is powered by the TaxJar API (a name that you’ll see later on this list), so you can view all of the currently-supported locations at this TaxJar help article.
However, while WooCommerce Tax does support over 30 different countries, it only supports a single tax location per store. So if you’re selling from more than one store location in different tax jurisdictions, you might need a different WooCommerce tax plugin.
To use the automated WooCommerce tax services, you’ll need to have both Jetpack and the WooCommerce Services plugin installed on your store.
The plugin itself is free.
Official WooCommerce Tax Services
2. TaxJar
TaxJar is a SaaS tool that helps with automatic sales tax calculations. As I mentioned above, the official WooCommerce Services tax tool is itself powered by the TaxJar API.
However, the official TaxJar plugin for WooCommerce goes a lot further than the official WooCommerce tax services tool for stores in the USA.
See, the official TaxJar plugin doesn’t just help you calculate what taxes to collect from different users, it also helps you automatically file state sales tax in the states where you owe taxes, which is super useful if your store is in the USA.
It can even dig deeper than state-level rates and give you what it calls “rooftop-level” tax calculations (because there might be different sales tax calculations even with different states or zip codes). In total, TaxJar supports over 14,000 different tax jurisdictions.
TaxJar will tell you exactly how much tax you owe to each state and let you automatically submit your returns so that you don’t miss any due dates.
TaxJar can also give you Economic Nexus insights so that you can automatically see whether or not you’ve crossed the economic threshold in the states where you’ve shipped products.
Basically:
- Official WooCommerce tax services – a free tool that uses the TaxJar API to calculate real-time tax rates, but doesn’t offer anything beyond that.
- TaxJar service – paid service that both calculates real-time tax rates and helps you easily file the tax that you owe to each state.
Basically, you’re paying a premium to greatly simplify the backend admin work of running your WooCommerce store and paying taxes in all 50 states.
TaxJar’s plans start at $19 per month for up to 200 orders and four free autofiles per year. Higher tier plans offer both increased limits and more features. You can test it out with a 30-day free trial – no credit card required.
Get TaxJar for WooCommerce
3. WooCommerce AvaTax
Avalara AvaTax is another cloud-based sales tax calculation tool.
Like TaxJar, it focuses primarily on the USA (though there are some other products that target different regions). It also offers “rooftop-level” tax calculations with support for over 12,000 different tax jurisdictions.
With the WooCommerce AvaTax plugin, you can easily turn on AvaTax to calculate accurate tax rates on WooCommerce.
The Avalara AvaTax product is specifically for tax calculations, but Avalara also offers other products to help you file taxes, handle compliance, and more. For example, Avalara Returns helps you file tax payments when needed.
The WooCommerce AvaTax plugin itself is free, but you will need a paid Avalara account to use it. To understand how much you’ll pay for Avalara, you’ll need to reach out to the sales team.
Get WooCommerce AvaTax Get AvaTax
4. EU/UK VAT Compliance Assistant for WooCommerce
So far, I’ve focused on WooCommerce tax plugins that primarily benefit stores in the USA. Now, let’s switch things over to a plugin that helps stores in the EU or UK – EU/UK VAT Compliance Assistant for WooCommerce.
This plugin helps you collect variable VAT for digital products based on the country of purchase, which is important to comply with EU tax rules that were implemented in 2015.
This plugin helps you identify the location of your shoppers using their billing/shipping address and their actual geolocation (by IP lookup). The plugin then stores this information so that you’re ready for any audits.
You can import/update VAT rates for all the EU countries with a single click. And you can also use a visitor’s geolocation to accurately show prices that include the proper VAT as soon as a shopper lands on your site.
The plugin is also “Brexit-ready” and supports both the EU and UK even after the expiration of the Brexit transition period.
All in all, if you sell to customers in the EU or UK, definitely give this one a look.
There’s a free version of the plugin available at WordPress.org, as well as a premium version that adds more features. The premium version costs £35.00.
Get EU/UK VAT Compliance Assistant for WooCommerce
5. YITH WooCommerce EU VAT
As the name suggests, YITH WooCommerce EU VAT is another EU-focused WooCommerce tax plugin.
It helps you automatically charge the correct VAT based on each shopper’s country, including support for the taxation rules on digital goods that came into effect in 2015. You can import all EU tax rates with a single click to save time. And it also supports both B2C and B2B sales, which are taxed differently under EU rules.
To handle everything, you’re able to ask shoppers for their location and VAT information. You can also compare their answer against their actual geolocation (via IP address) to make sure that they match.
You can choose whether or not to show the VAT details to all shoppers, or only shoppers from outside your own country.
What’s more, the plugin can also help you generate the MOSS report for different countries and time periods, which helps with your backend admin processes and helps you accurately calculate the VAT that you owe.
YITH WooCommerce EU VAT starts at €70 for use on a single site.
Get YITH WooCommerce EU VAT
6. Tax Exempt for WooCommerce
As the name suggests, Tax Exempt for WooCommerce helps you exempt certain shoppers from being required to pay tax on your store.
To control who can claim the tax exemption, you get several different options:
- You can automatically exempt certain WordPress user roles from being required to pay tax.
- You can give users an option to claim tax exempt status on the checkout page. You can then require users to upload supporting documentation (which you can verify before actually exempting them).
- You can manually grant tax exemption to certain users from the WordPress backend.
Users will also be able to manage their tax exempt status from the regular WooCommerce “My Account” area and you can also view/manage all of those details from the WordPress backend.
You can also add a tax exempt summary to email notifications, order confirmations, and more.
Tax Exempt for WooCommerce is a premium plugin – it costs $59 for one year of support and updates. You can check out a live demo of the features here.
Get Tax Exempt for WooCommerce
Improve Your WooCommerce Tax Calculations Today
If you’re just looking for the simplest way to get started with taxes on WooCommerce, the free WooCommerce Services/Jetpack plugin offers a good option with support for 30+ countries in North America and Europe.
If you want even more automation, you might want to consider one of the paid services such as TaxJar or Avalara as they help you not just calculate rooftop-level taxes, but also file taxes in each state in some cases. And if you’re in the EU, you can find some useful options to help you accurately collect VAT.
For some other options to calculate accurate rates at your store, check out our collection of the best WooCommerce table rate shipping plugins.
Still have any questions about the best WooCommerce tax plugins? Let us know in the comments section!
Keep reading the article at Learn WordPress with WPLift. The article was originally written by Colin Newcomer on 2021-01-13 06:00:25.
The article was hand-picked and curated for you by the Editorial Team of WP Archives.