Settings ▸ Accounting ▸ Tax Rates

Tax Rates is a small but load-bearing surface — the rates configured here drive the tax-line behavior on every fee invoice and disbursement. This page documents Settings ▸ Accounting ▸ Tax Rates.

Rate columns

Column	Required	Purpose
Code	yes	Short identifier, unique within the org. Examples: HST, GST, PST, QST, Z.
Name	yes	Human-readable label shown in pickers (e.g. “HST 13%”).
Rate	yes	Percentage. Stored to 4 decimal places (13.0000, 9.9750).
Account	optional	The GL account this tax credits/debits to. Examples: 2200 HST/GST Payable for collected tax, 1290 HST Receivable for input tax credits paid on operating expenses.
Jurisdiction	optional	Free-form label for reporting (e.g. “Ontario”, “BC”, “Federal”).
Agency	optional	The tax-collecting body (e.g. “Canada Revenue Agency”, “Ontario Ministry of Finance”). Surfaces on invoice line footers and tax reports.
Citation	optional	The legal/regulatory source for the rate (e.g. “Excise Tax Act s.165”). Travels with the rate so the authority isn’t only on the reference page.
Effective date	optional	The date this rate took effect. Shown beside the rate so a stale figure is visible at a glance.
Source link	optional	A URL to the authority (CRA / provincial / statute). Rendered as a source ↗ link on the rate. Citation, effective date, and source are “Suggested — verify”, attorney-review-pending — they flag the source, they don’t assert it as final.
Applies to	enum	One or more of Fixed Fee, Time, Hard Costs, Soft Costs, Purchases (input tax / ITC on vendor bills). A single rate can cover any combination — this replaced the old two-boolean fees/disbursements flags in #226.
Default	bool	A default rate is the default for every scope in its Applies to set; no scope may be claimed by two defaults. So you can have one default each for Fixed Fee / Time / Hard Costs / Soft Costs / Purchases. The default auto-selects on new invoices.
Active	bool	Inactive rates hide from new invoices but stay on historical entries.

Common Canadian rates

Rates change — verify before you rely on them. Not tax advice.

The figures below (HST 13%, QST 9.975%, PST 7%, GST 5%) are illustrative starting points. Sales-tax rates and their effective dates change. Confirm the current rate and effective date for your jurisdiction against the CRA’s Charge and collect the GST/HST page (and your provincial authority) before relying on them. The fully cited, per-province table lives on the Tax rates reference. Attorney-review-pending — the rate citations await professional sign-off.

A typical Ontario law firm seeds:

Code	Rate	Account	Default?
HST	13%	2200 HST Payable	Default for fees + disbursements
Z	0%	—	—

A BC firm seeds:

Code	Rate	Account
GST	5%	2200 GST Payable
PST	7%	2210 PST Payable
Z	0%	—

A Quebec firm:

Code	Rate	Account
GST	5%	2200 GST Payable
QST	9.975%	2210 QST Payable
Z	0%	—

Adding rates

Click + New tax rate to open the side sheet:

1. Code (required, unique) and Name
2. Rate as a decimal (e.g. 13 or 9.975)
3. Account — pick from the GL chart (Liability range for collected, Asset range for ITC)
4. Applies to — tick the scopes this rate covers (Fixed Fee, Time, Hard Costs, Soft Costs, Purchases); at least one must be checked
5. Default — toggle if this should auto-select on new invoices
6. Active — leave on; toggle off to retire a rate later

Saving a new default auto-clears the flag on any prior default — no need to un-default the old one first.

Editing rates

Click any row to reopen the side sheet. Code is editable but should be rare — historical invoices reference the rate ID, not the code, so renames don’t break audit trails, but they do change what the picker shows going forward.

Archiving rates

Click the trash icon on a row → confirm. Athenty soft-deletes (sets isActive=false); historical invoices keep the rate on file. To genuinely retire a rate’s history, contact support — but in practice, soft-delete is what every audit-defensible system supports.

Tax Rate Groups

Below the rate table, Tax Rate Groups let you bundle two or more component rates — GST + PST, or state / county / city tax — into a single line the client sees on the invoice, while Athenty still tracks and posts each component separately for accurate liability reporting.

A Tax Rate Group is a container, not a new rate:

• Each component rate keeps its own GL account, so a “GST 5% + PST 7%” group still produces two posting lines (5% to GST Payable, 7% to PST Payable) — exactly how remittance reports expect to see them.
• The group’s effective rate is the sum of its live members and is never stored. Change a component from 5% to 6% and every group it belongs to reflects it automatically — no group edit required.
• The same rate can belong to multiple groups (one GST 5% shared by a BC group and a Quebec group — a many-to-many relationship).
• Components are always shown separately as chips, never harmonized into one number.

Creating a group

1. Click + New group beneath the rate table.
2. Enter a Code (e.g. BC-GST-PST, max 16 chars) and Name (e.g. “BC GST + PST”).
3. Tick the component rates — each selected rate gets a #1, #2 … badge showing the order it will appear in.
4. The dialog shows a Combined display rate (“derived live, never stored”) so you can sanity-check the total. Chip order follows your selection order.
5. Save. The group lands in the table below the standalone rates with its components as separate chips and a Combined column for reference.

Editing a group reopens the dialog with members pre-checked and an Active toggle. Archiving (the trash icon) deactivates the group; the component rates and any historical postings are untouched, and you can re-surface it with Show inactive groups.

Reporting

The Tax Liability report (Settings ▸ Accounting ▸ Reports) always breaks tax out per component, grouped by agency — never by the group container. The grouping is purely a customer-facing convenience on the invoice; the books and the remittance numbers stay component-level.

Composite stacks

Standalone tax rates are never auto-synthesized into a single composite (e.g., a literal “HST = GST + PST” rate). Provinces with stacked taxes show their components as separate lines on the underlying invoice and in reporting — that’s how Canadian tax filings expect to see them. When you want the client-facing invoice to read as one combined line while the books still split it, use a Tax Rate Group (above) rather than a hand-rolled composite rate.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Likely cause
New rate not in picker	Check Active is on AND the rate’s Applies to set includes the scope the picker is for (Fixed Fee / Time / Hard Costs / Soft Costs / Purchases).
Default not auto-selecting	The default flag is per-scope. Check the prior default still covers the same scope in its Applies to set.
Saving rejected with “isDefault scope conflict”	Trying to set two defaults for the same scope — service auto-clears, but this means the prior default came from a different audit log row not yet refreshed. Reload the table.
Group’s Combined column looks wrong	It is the live sum of the current member rates, not a stored value. If a component rate changed, the combined figure changed with it — that’s expected.
A group can’t be saved	A group needs a Code, a Name, and at least one component rate selected.

Sources & authorities

The rates you configure here are your firm’s responsibility to keep current. The authorities below are the official sources behind the rate model and the GST/HST treatment Athenty applies. They remain attorney-review-pending until a lawyer signs them off, and rates should always be verified against the current source on the date you rely on them.

• GST/HST rates by province — CRA, Charge and collect the GST/HST — which rate to use (rates change — verify the current rate + effective date)
• Input Tax Credits (ITCs) — CRA, Input tax credits
• Excise Tax Act (GST/HST statute) — Excise Tax Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. E-15, on laws-lois.justice.gc.ca — incl. s. 169 (ITC entitlement)
• Per-province cited rate table + disbursement treatment — Tax rates reference (current Canadian rates with sources + effective dates, and how GST/HST applies to hard vs soft costs and the separate acting-as-agent option)

Hard/soft cost vs. agency are separate — don’t conflate them

A disbursement’s type (hard cost vs soft cost) and the acting-as-agent option are independent. A soft cost is never an “agency” disbursement — agency only applies to a hard/paid disbursement. See Accounting ▸ Disbursements and the Tax rates reference for the full treatment and the supporting CRA / Excise Tax Act citations.