Sales Tax on Photography Invoices

If you’re registered to collect sales tax, you set your rates once and Spatiko carries them through the whole job — the booking form, the order, the invoice PDF, and the client’s emails. There’s no separate tax step at billing time.

One thing to be clear about up front: Spatiko applies the rates you configure. It doesn’t determine what you owe, where you’re registered, or which of your services are exempt. Those are questions for your accountant.

Setting up your rates

Rates live under Sales tax in Settings → Payments. You can keep up to 20 on file, each with:

• A name — what the client sees on the line: GST, PST, State sales tax, whatever applies where you work.
• A percentage — the rate itself, to four decimal places, so fractional rates land exactly rather than rounded to something close.
• A registration number (optional) — printed on invoices and receipts alongside the tax it belongs to.
• An on/off toggle — keep a rate on file without charging it, and switch it back on when it applies again.

Rates stack. Configure two and each one is calculated and shown as its own labelled line rather than blended into a single number — a client owed both a federal and a provincial tax sees both, and so does a client in a state with a separate county rate.

If you aren’t required to charge sales tax, add no rates. Nothing is applied anywhere and no tax line appears on anything the client sees.

What gets taxed

Tax is calculated on your taxable line items plus the travel fee — not on the order total as a whole.

Discounts come off proportionally. When a promo code or a manual discount reduces an order, only the discount’s share of the taxable portion reduces the amount tax is calculated on. A discount that mostly lands against non-taxable work doesn’t quietly shrink your tax.

Exempting what isn’t taxable

Every service and package carries its own taxable setting, and so does a one-off custom line you add to an order by hand. Leave it on for the work you’re required to charge tax on, and switch it off for anything exempt where you operate.

A non-taxable item still counts toward the order total. It’s simply left out of the tax calculation. A package’s setting governs the whole bundle rather than the individual services inside it.

Where tax shows up

Once a rate is enabled, tax follows the money the whole way:

• The booking form’s review step — the client sees each rate and the resulting total before they commit, so tax is never a surprise at checkout.
• The order — in the Billing card’s pricing rail, alongside subtotal, discount, and travel fee.
• The invoice or receipt PDF — each rate on its own line in the totals block, labelled with its name and percentage. Any rate with a registration number also prints that number under your business details, which is what a client needs to claim their own input tax credits. Credit notes that credit specific lines prorate the tax the same way.
• Client emails — confirmation and payment emails carry the same breakdown, registration numbers included.

When tax is calculated

Two things are true here, and it’s worth knowing both.

An issued invoice is frozen. Issuing an invoice locks its lines and totals, tax included — so a document you’ve already issued keeps the numbers your client actually owed. Change a rate next quarter and last quarter’s invoices don’t move.

But the order’s live pricing follows your settings. Change an order’s line items, its discount, or its travel fee and the tax is re-derived from your currently enabled rates. If you’ve changed a rate since that order was booked, the edited order picks up the new one. When that matters, pin the rates you want with a per-order override.

Overriding tax on one order

When a shoot falls outside your usual tax jurisdiction, you can change which rates apply to that single order — edit the taxes in the pricing rail on the order’s Billing card.

What you get is a checkbox list of the rates you’ve configured, pre-checked to match what the order is currently using. From there you can:

• Uncheck the rates that don’t apply and save — the order uses only what’s left.
• Uncheck all of them to mark the order tax-exempt.
• Reset to business defaults to drop the override entirely and go back to your enabled rates.

It isn’t a free-text rate box. You’re choosing from the rates you’ve already set up, so if a job needs a rate you don’t have yet, add it in Settings → Payments first. If an order is pinned to a rate you’ve since removed from your settings, that rate still shows in the list, flagged as no longer in settings, so you can see why the order looks different from the rest.

Overriding one order never touches any other. For where this sits in the wider order workflow, see managing an order.

Importing past orders

If you’re bringing history across from another platform, the CSV order import has a tax column. It records the tax you already charged on that order rather than recalculating it — the amount is treated as part of the total you’re importing, not added on top.

Spatiko doesn’t decide what you owe

Spatiko applies the rates you configure, to the items you’ve marked taxable, and shows the result on every document the client sees. It doesn’t know where you’re registered, which rate belongs on a given property, or which of your services are exempt — and it won’t guess. Registration, rates, exemptions, and filing are between you and your accountant or tax authority.

For how tax appears on the paperwork itself, see how invoices work.

Go deeper

• Getting paid — how payments work — where tax sits in the wider money workflow of a shoot.
• When clients pay — payment timing — how the taxed total is shown on the review step before a client commits.
• Business profile, branding and legal documents — the business details printed alongside tax on every invoice.
• Services and pricing models — where each service’s taxable setting lives.
• Travel time and travel fees — the other charge tax is calculated on.