In Materio, when pricing a scope item or a selection option, you are offered two fields for taxes. Depending on the rules in your state and whether you are buying wholesale with a tax-exempt certificate, you should use one or the other. In most states, if you are "reselling" to your client (meaning, marking up the cost), you may be required to collect sales tax from them on your invoices. Make sure to check with your tax professional what the rules are for your projects.
Vendor Tax is what sales tax vendors will charge you when you buy products. This lets you figure that rate into your internal cost of goods. If you are buying wholesale or if you have a tax-exempt certificate in your state, this should always be 0%.
Client Tax is what sales tax you are required by the state to collect from your clients, if any. This commonly applies if if you mark up products and resell them to clients. This tax is added to your invoices you send to your clients. Whether you need to use this depends on whether your projects are taxable. In some states, construction is untaxed and in others it is.
So which should I use?
Which one you use It depends on the state you operate in & the state's rules about the type of project you're running. As a rule of thumb, you should be using either Vendor Tax or Client Tax but not both. In rare cases where your vendor does not accept tax-exemption certificates and you had to purchase a product at retail where they collected tax from you, and if you are also reselling to your client. There are two common situations:
A) I am purchasing goods from vendors and reselling to clients
The “Client Tax” field in Materio is how you define sales tax that must be collected from clients when you resell to them. Sales tax you’re required to collect is based on the total selling price (for example, a $12.99 accessory) to your clients. Typically, as a reseller you should be exempt when you purchase (sing a reseller certificate to get exemption from sales tax at the supplier) and thus should be able to set a Vendor Tax of 0%.
If you paid sales tax on items that were purchased for resale, you may be able to obtain a credit or refund for the tax paid. We would suggest working with your accountant about that process in your state. However, this can be quite a bit more paperwork to keep track of, so we always recommend resellers take the simplest approach: purchase wholesale and use their exemption.
An example of sales tax based upon selling price:
If you purchased an item for $100 and paid $8.25 in sales tax, your total cost is $108.25. If you then mark up and sell the item for $150, you would need to charge your customer sales tax based on the selling price of $150, regardless of whatever costs that you paid. You wouldn’t be “charging tax twice” - it is collected once, based upon the selling price presented to the client. The fact that you already paid the supplier $8.25 and covered that cost in your sale is sort of immaterial from the state’s perspective; you should be able to claim that $8.25 back for yourself.
B) I am purchasing goods on clients’ behalf, being reimbursed for them, and offering my services to manage procurement
In this case, you simply pay whatever sales tax is charged by the supplier and pass that cost directly to your clients when you invoice them to be reimbursed. You do not need to set a Client Tax, as that Vendor Tax is already baked into the cost that you charge them.