Square not handling tax correctly on ECWID transactions?

[juiceaustin]

We are using ECWID as our web store front with an ingegration to Square POS. When an item is bought in our online store, ECWID sums the order, calculates tax due, and sends a confirmation to the customer. Everything works beautifully.

However, when the transaction comes across to Square, Square treats the entire sale (item cost plus tax) as the net/gross sale amount. Put another way, Square does not recognize that tax is included in the transaction so the entire amount is treated as a "Custom Amount" sale. This means that net/gross sales, taxes, taxable sales, and non-taxable sales are all incorrect in Square's reporting. We rely on this reporting for a variety of month-end financial reporting.

Has anyone else seen this problem or does anyone have a solution? I would love to hear from Square too. 

[RHatch]

Not to sure on this but I will give it a shot.  Here is a help article I found. Are you syncing your inventory between the two?  If you are just using Square as a payment gateway then that could be the issue.  If you are syncing inventory I would think it would work as you expect as stated in the help article.  I would log into your ECWID portal and check the settings as laid out in the help article.

Anyone else have experience with this?

[juiceaustin]

Thanks for the info. I don't see anything in that article about synching inventory? We're a restaurant so inventory control through square doesn't make much sense for us. That said, we're just looking for Square to handle the online transaction with a sale amount and a tax amount, and report correctly in the Square reports. I wouldn't think inventory should have anything to do with this.

[RHatch]

As a payment processor, the only thing that is sent is the total.  You will have to pull your sales report from your online store to get the information you are looking for.

Think of it this way.  If you used the old (still current) card terminals to charge a card you would just enter the total amount and swipe the card.   The Same thing is happening with your online store and Square.

[juiceaustin]

To back up, is there an alternate solution for this? It seems inconceivable this is "working as designed".

If there is no solution, then you are saying all Square reports that include online transactions as a payment processor are incorrect - net sales, gross sales, taxable sales, non-taxable sales, etc. So the thousands (or is it tens of thousands) of customers out there relying on Square reports for financial auditing are using data that are incorrect? And asking every one of these vendors to try to reconcile the bad reporting data in Square and back-in to accurate numbers using excel every month isn't a solution in my opinion.

[RHatch]

I would touch base with both Square and ECWID support.  The more I read the more it looks like you should see that data.  There might be something not communicating right or a setting that is not on.  If you read the help article I linked in the first post it says what you should see.

[juiceaustin]

From ECWID Support:

"The integration between Ecwid and Square gateway currently doesn't support itemization (sending detailed information in separate lines) as their (Square's) APIv2 doesn't support this yet. Hence there is a net Custom Amount shown on the Square side. So, we should wait till Square updates their new API to add this feature to our integration with them, I'm afraid.

In order to get information about collected tax amounts, you can download necessary order data from Ecwid control panel > My Sales > Orders section to CSV file. You can then open it in a spreadsheet and see the required information in the "Order tax" column. You can learn more about it here: How to export orders."

It's hard to believe but at least ECWID gave accurate info, something I have not been able to get from Square.