Money & sales tax

The part worth reading properly, because getting it wrong is the kind of mistake you find out about months later.

We're not your accountant ShopFlow does the arithmetic you tell it to do. Whether labor is taxable where you trade, and what you owe on parts you use yourself, are questions for someone who knows your jurisdiction. Set the rates once with proper advice and the app is consistent from then on.

Where rates live

Shop Settings → Money. Everything that decides what a job costs is on that one tab: your labor rate, per-technician cost rates, sales tax, travel and mileage, shop fees, and the Square connection.

Sales tax is not revenue

This trips up nearly everyone. Sales tax is money you collect and hand to the state. It was never yours.

So ShopFlow keeps it out of revenue, profit, average ticket and every customer's lifetime spend. Your dashboard total will be lower than what actually hit your bank account, and that gap is the tax you're holding.

Where you look	What it shows
Work order list — Total	What the customer pays, tax included. Matches Square.
Dashboard, Analytics, Accounting	What you earned. Tax excluded.
Settings → Money → Tax Summary	Sales tax collected, and use tax accrued, kept separate.

Issued invoices never change

When you issue an invoice or estimate, it stores the prices it was issued at. Raise your labor rate next month and that document still says what it said when you handed it over.

This is deliberate. A document that silently recalculated would rewrite your own financial history, and you'd have no way to explain a figure a customer is looking at.

So fix mistakes before you issue Once a document exists, correcting the work order won't change it. Void the document and issue a new one instead.

Internal work orders — your own machines

Tick Internal on a work order when you're working on your own equipment. Internal jobs stay out of sales, profit and customer records completely — they aren't income, because you didn't sell anything.

That still leaves the tax question, and there are two lawful answers. Pick one:

Use tax

No sale happened, so no sales tax is charged. Instead you owe use tax on parts you pulled from resale stock and consumed yourself. Tick those parts in the Use tax column and ShopFlow totals the liability. The job shows labor and parts as your internal cost, so you can see what the work really cost you.

Internal charge

You buy the parts from the shop personally. That's a genuine retail sale, so ordinary sales tax applies and gets remitted through it — and no use tax accrues. Labor bills at zero, because you aren't paying yourself to fix your own mower. The hours still stay on the job so you can see the real cost.

Never both Use tax exists precisely because no sales tax was charged. Applying both to the same parts means paying the state twice out of your own pocket. ShopFlow will only ever apply one, and switching between the modes swaps which one — it never adds them together.

The two file on different lines of the same return, which is why Settings → Money shows sales tax collected and use tax accrued as separate figures. Don't add them together.

Shop fees

Fees are extras you add to customer jobs — shop supplies, a card surcharge. Each can be a flat amount or a percentage, and each can be taxable or not. You can skip a fee on an individual job.

Fees never apply to internal work orders in either mode. You don't charge yourself a card surcharge.

Declined jobs

A job closed as Declined books only its diagnostic fee. The estimate you quoted was never accepted, so none of it counts as money earned, and the parts you'd reserved go back to stock.

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