#### Adding Tax Zones

Tax zones in Parallels Business Automation - Standard define the tax rate(s) to be applied to a customer's order depending on the customer's country of residence. You can define the order of tax rates application for each tax zone. In addition, you can narrow the scope of the tax zone down to one or more customers (i.e., customers accounts) that reside in a given country.

A tax zone can be associated with a customer account in one of the following ways:

- By account. Automatically associated with a customer account without respect to the country.
- By country. Automatically associated with a customer account when a customer creates an account to buy something in your HSPstore and specifies his (or her) country of residence.
- By default. Automatically associated with a customer account if no specific tax zones that correspond either to an account or to a country were found.
- Assigned manually to a customer account from your Provider Control Center (Account properties - Financial Info tab).

The Account assignment is the primary one for the tax zone application. This means that the tax zones assigned to account will be checked first, after this the Parallels Business Automation - Standard will check if any existing country-specific tax zones match, and finally if neither account-specific, nor country-specific zones were found the default tax zone will be assigned. The default tax zone can be selected in Taxation General Settings.

If you use tax exemption, and a customer have entered the VAT number, then all tax zones assignments are skipped, tax rates are not applied, and the corresponding record is added both to an order placed by a customer and an invoice generated after this order is paid. You can view the tax-exempted invoices in the special Taxation Reports listing provided under the Taxation Manager.

To add a tax zone:

1. Click Taxation Manager on the Billing Director submenu.
2. Select Tax Zones from the Taxation Manager submenu. The list of existing tax zones (if any) appears on the screen.
3. Click the New Tax Zone button.
4. Fill the form that appears on the screen:
   1. Type the short, but descriptive name for the tax zone into the Name field. This name should help you to recognize the tax zone when associating the tax rate with a tax zone, or assigning a tax zone to a customer account.
   2. You can enter a free-form description of the tax zone into the Description field.
   3. Select the Type of tax zone from one of the following variants:

      Not assigned. You can set the option button to this to create a tax zone that is not associated neither with a country, nor with a customer account. Such type of the tax zone can be used as the default one to apply taxes to customer's orders if no tax zone was created for the customer's country (or account).

      Assigned to country/state. You can set the option button to this to create a tax zone to apply taxes to orders that came from a particular country (or a country and a state inside a country). Please select the country and state (if needed) from the relevant drop-down menus.

      Assigned to accounts. You can set the option button to this to create a tax zone to apply taxes to particular customer accounts, without respect to the customer's country. To select accounts, click the Add button next to this menu and select one or more accounts from the list that appears in the popup window. To remove an account from the list, click on the account name and click the Remove button to exclude.

   4. Select the tax rates and define the tax rates application order by adding the predefined tax rates to the Rates applied to the tax zone (in the order of their application) menu. To this effect, click the Add button next to this menu and select one or more tax rates from the list that appears in the popup window. To adjust the tax rates application order, click on the tax rate name (to select several ones, use Ctrl+Click) and click the Up or Down button to move the selected item(s) up or down the list. To cancel a tax rate for a tax zone, click on the tax rate name and click the Remove button to exclude a tax rate from the list.
5. Click the Save button.

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