AccurateTax FAQs

Here you’ll find answers to frequently-asked questions from our customers. If you need help with something not listed here, please contact us and we’ll do everything we can to assist.

General AccurateTax Questions

A call occurs when your store communicates with the AccurateTax server. There are three types of calls:

  • Address Validation calls happen after the shopper enters their address, for the purpose of pinpointing and validating the address
  • Sales Tax calls are what calculates the sales tax on the items being ordered
  • Commit calls tell us that an order has been placed and should be included in your reports

We try to make this as easy as possible. You don’t pay per call; you pay per order. If your store receives 50 taxable orders a day, you’ll be charged for 50 transactions, no matter how many actual calls are made. When comparing sales tax software, make sure you take this into consideration. Some other providers charge by call, and a single transaction may have 10 or more calls.

The only exception is for customers who want to scrub all addresses, and not just those in taxable states. Those accounts will be adjusted according to the number of additional calls made for address validation. Sales tax usage is still based on taxable transactions and not on individual calls. (Separate address validation is only available in on select platforms.)

To get accurate sales tax calculations, your website must provide us with a validated, scrubbed address. However, if you don’t have nexus in some states, you may still wish to scrub shipping addresses, even though the orders are not taxable.

Address validation provides several benefits beyond its need for sales tax calculations. First, it can reduce the time you spend researching a correct address when a customer provides an address that is noted as invalid by your shipping software. Second, it reduces or eliminates address correction fees charged by certain carriers.

Finally, address correction also prevents packages being returned and requiring re-shipment if the address provided by the customer could not be corrected by the carrier.

Shopify Questions

Due to a limitation in Shopify’s API, we do not perform sales tax calculations during checkout on your store. You will need to use Shopify’s built-in Shopify Tax to calculate taxes. We download orders, recalculate them, and perform all filings and returns using the correctly-calculated values.

To review or change the states where you are collecting sales tax, please perform the following steps in your Shopify store’s administration:

  1. Click Settings in the left column. A large modal window will appear with all setting categories listed in a new left column.
  2. Click Taxes and Duties in the left column of the modal window.
  3. In the right column, under Regional settings, then click United States.
  4. Scroll down to the Regions you’re collecting in section.
  5. The states where you are currently collecting sales tax are listed here. You can add or remove states. Note that AccurateTax does not use the optional Sales tax ID field, so you can leave that blank unless you have other reasons to include it.

If you make any changes to where you collect, it is imperative that you work with your AccurateTax account manager to make sure our list matches your account settings.

Shopify reports the states where you are close to reaching or have exceeded the small seller exemption for economic nexus. These exemptions differ by state, and it’s important to make sure you’re registered in, collecting for, and filing sales tax returns in all states where you have sales tax liability.

To review the information provided by Shopify:

  1. Click Settings in the left column. A large modal window will appear with all setting categories listed in a new left column.
  2. Click Taxes and Duties in the left column of the modal window.
  3. In the right column, under Regional settings, then click United States.
  4. Scroll down to the Sales tax liability insights section. Here, Shopify will tell you where you have liability according to their records, and whether you are collecting in each state. Please be aware that Shopify can only report on the transactions it knows about, so if you utilize other sales channels, this report may be inaccurate.

Here is how this report appears inside of Shopify:

Shopify sales tax liability insights

If you sell products that have any sort of special taxation – including but not limited to apparel, food, and medical equipment – then it is imperative that you assign the appropriate tax categories to the products in your catalog. Shopify offers suggested tax categories for your products, but it is up to you to accept and verify (or correct) their suggestions. If your categories are not set, or are set incorrectly, then you may be liable for under- or over-collecting sales tax.

You can set product categories individually, in bulk, or via a CSV upload. Shopify also shows you which products are not categorized. For more help, see this page in their documentation.

In 2025, Shopify starting managing their Shop app as a marketplace. For sales tax purposes, this means they calculate and collect the tax, but more importantly, they remit it themselves. Therefore, all Shopify users have their Shop app channel orders marked as non-taxable marketplace orders. If you have other sales channels that operate the same way, please let your account manager know. The Shop app is the only one we set up automatically for all our Shopify clients.

We have to set this up manually on your account, so please let your AccurateTax account manager know if you collect tips.

Magento Questions

In Magento, taxes are calculated at the order level instead of each individual item. This can result in slight rounding discrepancies. For example, imagine a shopper orders 2 different items that are $55.91 each. If 7% tax is calculated on each line, then each line’s tax is $3.91. Add those together for a total of $7.82. This is the way taxes are displayed in Magento.

Instead, if you add the prices first, you get $111.92, and 7% tax on that subtotal is $7.83. This is the way taxes are calculated in AccurateTax.

Miva Merchant Questions

Miva Merchant doesn’t run its “fulfillment modules” automatically on manually-entered orders. You might also notice that other fulfillment processing functions aren’t happening, such as sending order confirmation emails. To resolve this, you’ll need to manually call the fulfillment modules. Here’s how:

  1. Once you have finished editing the order in Miva, click the “Order Fulfillment Modules” link. It is in the list of links above the “Ship To:” column on the order page.
  2. In the modal window, you will see a list of fulfillment modules. Check the box next to AccurateTax. (You can also check any other modules you want to process.)
  3. Click the blue “Process” button. This will send a commit message to AccurateTax for this order.
  4. If later you make changes to an order, complete these steps again. The most recent commit message takes precedence.

Failure to complete these steps properly will cause your reports to be incomplete.

OpenCart Questions

This is due to a setting in your store, not AccurateTax. The reason is that OpenCart is primarily developed in Europe, where sales tax (VAT) is included in the product price that you see while shopping. You can easily turn this off in your OpenCart settings.

To do so, click the “cog” icon in the OpenCart admin, and then click Settings. Next, click the Edit button (blue button with a pencil icon) next to the name of your store. Click the Option tab on the next screen, and scroll down to the Taxes section. The first option should say “Display Prices With Tax”. Change this to No, then scroll back up and click the Save button (blue button with floppy disk icon).