Collect tax on your bookings

Tax lives in Settings → the Payments tab, in a card headed Tax Collection below your Stripe details. It only appears once Stripe is connected and its onboarding is finished — before that the card just asks you to connect Stripe first, because the tax calculation runs through your own Stripe account.

What you need before you switch it on

Two things. The first is a finished Stripe connection, since every rate is calculated by Stripe against the client's billing address at checkout. The second is at least one tax registration — a place you have told Stripe you are registered to collect in, such as your province, state, or country. Calso will not let you finish without one, and that is deliberate: charging tax somewhere you are not registered creates a problem you would rather not have.

Turn on tax collection

1. Open the Tax Collection card

   Go to Settings in the sidebar, open the Payments tab, and scroll past your Stripe status to the card headed Tax Collection. Click Set Up Tax Collection to start the three-step setup.

2. Fill in your business details

   The first step, Business Details, is a panel from Stripe asking about your business for tax purposes — where you operate from and what you sell. This is what Stripe uses to work out which obligations apply to you. Fill it in and click Continue.

3. Add your tax registrations

   On Tax Registrations, add one entry for each place you are registered to collect tax. A coach working in one province or state usually has exactly one. Add them all now if you cross borders, then click Continue.

4. Choose how tax appears at checkout

   Display Preferences offers two options: Show price + tax separately, where a client sees the price and the tax as two lines and pays the sum of them, or Show tax-inclusive prices, where the client pays exactly your listed price and the tax is carved out of it. Pick the one that matches how you already quote your prices.

5. Switch it on

   Click Enable Tax Collection. The card changes to Tax Collection Enabled with a green Active badge, and from that moment tax is calculated on every new paid booking, package, product, and group sale. Anything already sold is untouched.

Exclusive and inclusive, and which one you want

This is the one choice worth thinking about, because it decides who absorbs the tax — you or the client.

Exclusive is the norm in the US and Canada, where prices are quoted before tax. Inclusive is the norm in the EU, the UK, and Australia, where an advertised price is understood to be the final one. Choose by the convention your clients expect. You can change your mind later without redoing the setup: on the Tax Collection Enabled card, the Display Mode line has a Change link that swaps between the two modes on the spot.

What clients see when they book

Any checkout that takes a card already asks for a Billing Address — country first, then street, city, province or state, and postal code. With tax on, those same fields become what the rate is worked out from, so the total updates as the client fills them in; Calso guesses the country from their device to save them typing. In exclusive mode a line above the total names the tax and its rate; in inclusive mode the total stays put and a note underneath says how much of it is tax.

Reading the tax report

Your record lives under Analytics in the sidebar. When tax is on, a Tax Collected card joins that page with a View Full Tax Report link, and that link opens Tax Reports — the page you actually file from.

Pick a period across the top with This Month, Last Month, This Quarter, Last Quarter, This Year, or Custom with your own two dates. Four cards summarise it: Total Tax Collected, Taxed Transactions (with your total transaction count underneath, so you can see how much of your trade was taxable), Tax Refunded from sessions you cancelled and refunded, and Net Tax Owed — the first minus the third.

Below them, Remittance Summary is the table most filings are built from: one row per jurisdiction with its tax name, rate, amount collected, and transaction count. Tax by Transaction Type splits the same money across bookings, packages, products, group bookings, and group enrollments. Transaction Details lists the individual charges, 25 to a page.

Exporting for your accountant

The Export Tax Report card at the bottom gives you three downloads of whatever period is selected. Download Excel (.xlsx) produces a workbook with three sheets — Summary, Transactions, and Refunds — and is the one to send an accountant. Download CSV gives you the transaction rows alone, one line per charge with client, description, pre-tax amount, rate, tax, and jurisdiction, ready for bookkeeping software. Download PDF is the summary only, with no individual charges, which makes it the right thing to attach to a filing.

If you ever need to stop, Disable Tax Collection on the same Payments card confirms with Yes, Disable. New bookings stop having tax calculated; everything already collected stays as it was, and you can switch it back on whenever you need to.

Tax is worked out on top of whatever you have priced, so it pays to settle your prices first — see price a single session — and to know what the rest of your numbers count, in what each Analytics number counts.