How do you manage regional sales tax reporting in Washington State?

Shopify Discussion

Topic summary

Shopify merchants in Washington State (and other states like New York) face challenges reporting sales tax because they must report gross sales amounts by jurisdiction, not just tax collected. The default Shopify Sales Tax report only shows collected tax, creating significant manual work.

Initial workarounds discussed:

  • Manually combining Sales Tax and Total Sales reports in Excel (taking hours)
  • Exporting total sales, filtering by billing state/province, and calculating sums
  • Using third-party apps like Better Reports (paid solution)

Community frustration:
Multiple users expressed frustration that basic tax compliance reporting requires paid apps or extensive manual work, arguing this functionality should be built into all Shopify plan levels since it’s legally required.

Resolution:
Shopify released a new “United States Sales Tax” report that provides the needed breakdown by jurisdiction with gross sales amounts. However, one user noted discrepancies between net sales figures in this new report versus the Total Sales report, suggesting potential accuracy issues remain.

Summarized with AI on October 30. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

The sales tax report only shows the amount of tax collected. In Washington State, we have to report the dollar amount of the sales, not the amount of tax collected. Since I ship, I usually have 6-12 different municipalities that I have to report so I need the regional break down with different tax rates but also the actual dollar amount of the sales. Because of rounding, I’m actually paying quite a bit more in sales taxes if I report it based on tax collected versus actual sales amount.

How do you all deal with this? Is there a report I’m missing? Shopify support gave me instructions on adding regional sales info to the sales over time report but it’s heinously cumbersome. There must be a better way.

2 Likes
2

Hi Knittingman81,

This is a huge issue that I am seeing for Shopify stores on the Basic plan. I similarly have to report the net sales for several jurisdictions in New York and I can’t believe that the Sales Tax report provided by Shopify doesn’t have net sales included. I spent HOURS in Excel combining information from the Sales Tax report and the Total Sales report to come up with the numbers needed. Several of my friends who run ecommerce stores on Shopify who are using the Basic plan are having this same issue. so I hope the Shopify team updates that report soon! Sorry I don’t have a better answer, but wanted to let you know that you’re not alone!

3 Likes
3

Hi @knittingman81

Claudia here from Better Reports.

Have you been able to find a solution? If not, I would recommend our app Better Reports for this.

We have a built-in Tax collected per month report that breaks down the monthly sales tax by tax name (county). You can create a custom version filtered for specific shipping states showing sales and taxes for these specific regions. This can be displayed in segments (ex. monthly) or aggregate over a filtered time period (last quarter).

In addition to this, Better Reports has more than 60 built-in reports available out of the box that covers many common use cases for merchants. You can schedule reports to run at set frequencies to your email or Google Drive or export the reports in CSV, Excel or PDF format.

I encourage you to install Better Reports and start your free 14-day trial and I’ll be happy to set this up for you.

What do you think?

4

Having to pay for an app to do something that we have to do by law is ridiculous. It should be built in to all levels of Shopify automatically.

1 Like
5

Any luck in finding a way to isolate WA state gross sales easily?

I did find a way to do it quickly but something has changed, I think

Here’s what I had to do this time;

  • Export total sales for the quarter to your spreadsheet program

  • Sort for the “Billing Province” column (Shopify is Canadian)

  • Isolate the WA state sales

  • Do a sum for the gross sales.

  • You can do a sum for the taxes collected too, if needed.

You can find your overall gross sales in the Finance section - do a custom date range to get your quarterly numbers.

Having to pay for an app to do something that we have to do by law is ridiculous. Anything that is mandatory by law should be built in to all levels of Shopify automatically.

6

I have the upgraded plan and these reports are not available. I have emailed Shopify countless times to complaint about this because indeed we do need to report the NET sales, not the sales tax collected. NO solution in sight. They changed the reports a bunch of times and now have a report for…sales taxes collected. The only way to do this is to go through a report on an Excel spreadsheet and yes it does take an insane amount of time. My prior accountant charged me a whopping $1K for just one quarter of sales taxes because it took that long to extract all the information. Sorry I don’t have a solution, but yes spreadsheets are the only answer here.

7

Shopify has come out with a new report called United States Sales Tax that resolved the issue. Check it out!

1 Like
8

Yes! Finally, I can’t believe they finally have the report that we need for state excise tax returns! Thank you for mentioning this.

@knittingman81

@Janit_Calvo

@jsygiel

9

Although, I just came back to say that there are discrepancies between the NET sales on the United States sales tax report and the NET sales on the TOTAL Sales report. :tired_face:

10

Thankfully they created a report called United States sales tax that breaks it down like it’s needed.