Enable tax exemption rules to be applied to product categories instead of only individual items

[artizansty]

For those of us in hospitality (and others I am sure), there are several types of food and drink products that attract VAT when consumed on premises, but don't attract it when consumed off premises.

Square already has the mechanism to identify the type of sale (Dining in, Takeaway, etc), it already has the mechanism to assign individual products to categories, and it already has the mechanism to allow me to apply exemption rules to individual items - however not to entire categories.

Can this please be enabled please? Right now to ensure I am capturing as accurate VAT expense as possible, I need to generalise items (so rather than having a different item for each filled roll or cake we offer, I can only have one item with different modifiers) so that as new variants are added, they are automatically calculating the correct text exemptions.

The other thing is that this causes issues because things that are covered by chocolate for example still attract VAT, so my cake scenario is that I either need to:

1. maintain different cake items and ensure as we add new ones they have the right taxes exempted (with several new cakes being added each week, this is onerous)
2. maintain a non-choc-included and a choc-included cake item with various modifiers and ensure when new cakes are added in, they are added as the right modifier to the right item (this would cause a lot of confusion and frankly appear ridiculous for customers buying online)
3. maintain dine in and eat out versions of each product (nightmare for inventory management and online ordering)
4. maintain a single cake item with modifiers (as I do now) and either cop VAT on all possibly exempt items, or potentially commit fraud by not properly claiming the VAT I owe because VAT-able things are being exempted (also causing issues when selling online, as I can't associate images for individual cake offerings, missing a huge opportunity to sell visually).

Add it as a feature request, or whatever else needs to happen, but right now it costs thousands of merchants time and money accounting for this friction, or bearing the potential cost of filing incorrect VAT amounts.

[Kassi_]

Welcome back to the Community, @artizansty - 

Thank you for providing this excellent feedback on some of the changes you would like to see with the Square features for your business. 

I went ahead and moved your post to the new Ideate Board, so our Product Team can review.