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What customer exemptions are

Some buyers do not owe sales tax on a sale due to the nature of their business, sale type, or other circumstances. The most common example is resale. For example a retailer buying inventory to sell on presents a resale certificate to their supplier, and the supplier charges no tax. The tax will be collected instead when the goods reach the end consumer. Here is a non-exhaustive list of other exemptions: driveaway (a vehicle bought to be titled in another state), agriculture, manufacturing, direct pay, and government or nonprofit organizations. Taxwire stores exemption certificates on customer records. You manage them in the Taxwire App by opening the buyer on the Customers page and adding each certificate with its type, dates, covered states and the certificate document. If you want to load customers and their certificates in bulk, contact Taxwire support. At calculation time, each active certificate becomes the matching jurisdiction-scoped customer attribute. A resale certificate covering Texas becomes RESALE_USA_TX on every line that buyer appears on. The exemption then applies when the line’s product carries the matching product attribute, such as _RESALE. Most exemptions are deliberately double-triggered, because a buyer holding a resale certificate can still purchase items for their own use.

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Referencing the buyer with customer.preset

  • For customers created in Taxwire’s dashboard, preset.id is the customer id input into the platform and preset.source is taxwire (the default).
  • For customers synced from a connected platform, preset.id is the platform’s own id for that customer and preset.source is the platform name, for example stripe or quickbooks.
When the preset matches a customer record, Taxwire derives the customer attributes from that customer’s active certificates automatically, so you never pass RESALE_USA_TX yourself. The certificate is only half of the trigger, though. The line still needs the matching product attribute (for example _RESALE), either from its product preset or passed explicitly on product.tax_attributes. If the certificate is on file but the line carries no product attribute, the line is treated as taxable.

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Verifying the setup

Run a calculation for the exempt buyer in a state the certificate covers and check that tax comes back zero. Then check the negatives: a different buyer on the same products is still taxed, and the exempt buyer in a state the certificate does not cover is still taxed.
Exemption management is enabled per organization. If certificates you have loaded are not affecting calculations, contact support to confirm it is enabled for your account.

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The alternative: force attributes

Certificates only derive customer attributes for the exemption types Taxwire supports: resale, driveaway and 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations. This functionality is also useful when you cannot reference customer records at all. In those cases, assert the exemption directly on the request by passing a force attribute on customer.tax_attributes:
FORCE_RESALE is single-triggered, which means it treats the line as a resale purchase with no certificate on file and no product attribute required. It is an unconditional override, so only use it for buyers whose every purchase is exempt. Keep the buyer’s paperwork on record anyway. See Force attributes for the full behavior, the jurisdiction-scoped variants, and the cautions. Prefer the certificate path when the buyer’s exemption type supports it. It scopes the exemption to the states the certificate actually covers, stops applying when the certificate expires, and leaves an audit trail.