Setting up tax mappings so that your invoices in Xero have the correct taxes
Tip
If your organization only trades in a single tax region, such as Australia, New Zealand, UK, South Africa etc. In most cases you don’t need to set this up.
If your organization trades in a multi-tax region such as USA or sells services to organizations where the tax rates change, you should set this up.
Please note this will override the default tax codes in Xero with any mapped account codes that are applicable.
Please Note:
- Tax mapping only applies to sales invoices.
- By default My Accounting Toolbox doesn't do any tax calculations we pass the unit and quantity values to Xero and Xero does all tax calculations.
- Enabling Tax mapping will override line-item tax codes with those mapped.
- Once tax mapping is enabled - if you have a Autotask invoice sync'd to Xero that has a Autotask tax region that isn't mapped it will cause the invoice sync to fail for that invoice. This is by design and helps prevent invoices from being sync'd with incorrect tax information.
- It is ultimately your responsibility to ensure that taxes are mapped correctly for your organization and taxes are being calculated correctly in Xero, we strongly recommend that you enable the tax guard option with the recommended sync option, please see below.
Tax region name warning:
Do not rename tax regions if you have outstanding invoices to sync
To match your taxes correctly we need the tax region name generated against the invoice to match the current tax region name.
For example if a historical invoice has a tax region name of apples and you change the tax region name to oranges the historical invoice will still present to us as apples and our software will be unable to find the tax details.
Changing tax region names after all invoices have successfully sync'd is ok subject to you not requiring to resync a historical invoice for any reason.
Enable Tax Mapping
My Accounting Toolbox > Configuration > Tax Mappings
To turn on Tax Mapping ensure the Enable Tax Mapping option is set
Tax Guard
Tax Guard is a protection system to prevent misconfiguration between Autotask and Xero, if you accidentally setup the wrong tax mappings or have other tax mapping issues. Tax Guard compares the tax amounts generated in Xero and Autotask post sync. If the tax amount is different by +/- .99 an error is written in the event logs and alert email will be sent if your account is configured to receive emails. We also recommend you use the sync option below, sync with warning on sync dashboard.
Tax Guard - sync option (recommended)
By default tax guard will only write to the error logs, however we recommend you use the option to show a visible warning in your sync history where taxes didn't match, the sync will still complete but a note will be added in orange that the sync was "Complete with Warning"
Sync dashboard page
Sync logs
Linking Tax Codes
For each Autotask tax region(s) match it to the correct corresponding Xero Tax region then select the Link Codes button, that will add the matched codes to the list below. Repeat this step until all your Autotask tax regions are mapped.
If a invoice tries to sync and is missing a tax mapping. The sync status will change to fault and a error email will be emailed if configured to do so.
Invoice rounding between Autotask and Xero different by a few cents?