Why does the Clover Tax report not add up correctly?

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brokenoval asked Jul 18, '19 firan answered Jul 8, '24

Why does the Clover Tax report not add up correctly?

See my attachment which contains a snip of the tax report from a certain day in the past, there are a number of different tax rates for that day and attached was calculated by the Clover system.

Just to take the first line item as an example. The calculated VAT is €71.51, however when you do the calculations manually i.e. 599.79 / 113.5 * 13.5 = €71.34. So the actual VAT should be 71.34 vs what Clover is showing 71.51.

Can you explain what is causing the difference?

VAT or Fee

Taxable amountVAT or FeeVAT or Fee Collected13.5%€599.7913.50000%€71.5113.5% Bakery€42.4213.50000%€4.9523%€43.6023.00000%€8.26No Tax€22.940.00000%0

Update:
I have followed up the theory that this is a rounding issue related to each individual order item. I've gone through the day in question, and other days too using the "Export individual line items" report from the Orders section in the Dashboard.

Even with this data I cannot re-calculate the summaries in the report above. If for example I go through every single line item on the day sold at 23% the sum of the "Tax Amount" column in the export is €8.28 rather than the dashboard report (€8.26) or the unrounded amount (€8.156585).

I've attached the line items report with my calculations. lineitemsexport-20190724-1103-ist.zip

@jacobabrams - this might be a question for you as I've seen some of your responses on similar topics

Taxes

clover-vat-report.png (126.3 KiB)

lineitemsexport-20190724-1103-ist.zip (4.3 KiB)

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Answer 1 · 2019-11-13T20:55:51Z

kirby answered Nov 13, '19

there is
one thing with this merchant that is leading to more rounding:
they have 2 different 13.5% tax rates

So the code is collating the items for each rate.

For example

Suppose an order has
a €4 bottle of water at a 13.5% rate #1 and
a €4 espresso at a 13.5% rate #2

Then the tax code has to assume that these rates are for separate entities
so it calculates the tax paid separately for the water and the espresso
whereas if there was only one 13.5% rate
then it would combine them as €8 before calculating the tax.

That is
it would use a larger total which leads to less rounding

that is
twice it calculates
€4 at 13.5% as base price of €3.52 and €0.48 tax
for a total of €0.96 tax

rather than
€8 at 13.5% as base price of €7.05 and €0.95 tax

That is, with 2 separate tax rates there has to be more rounding, in this case one more rounding up by one cent whereas there would be only one rounding with one tax rate

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Answer 2 · 2024-07-08T08:53:53Z

firan answered Jul 8, '24

It seems Clover might be rounding differently than manual calculations. Clover likely uses standard rounding methods, which can account for slight discrepancies in VAT calculations.

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