If you're taking payment via Thinkific's built-in checkout process, customers will be charged the price set in your pricing settings. Taxes are not automatically applied or calculated when a student checks out. There are a few options if you need to charge or calculate tax for your courses.
For many instructors, our default checkout works just fine! The applicable tax will often be the same for all orders an instructor receives. And, depending on what you're teaching, the tax may not be applicable. For example, for sales made to customers in the EU, the tax may not be applicable if what you're teaching includes some live interaction, such as one-on-one or group coaching. Check out this page for more information
Thinkific team members are by no means tax experts, so please check with a local tax expert before making any decisions about whether or not tax is applicable.
If you've consulted your tax expert and you'll always be charging at the same rate, the best option is to include tax directly within the pricing as is set on the Pricing page of the Course Builder. You can add a note in your Course Description to let customers know that your pricing is tax inclusive if you like (a great selling point!)
But what if you need to charge tax at different rates for different orders? No problem! You have a few different options for this:
Use Quaderno to calculate tax at different rates (any plan)
A simple option is to keep charging directly through Thinkific's checkout process (with a little extra added to your pricing to cover your tax). You can then use our direct integration with a tax-friendly invoicing app called Quaderno to track the tax owed for each order. Quaderno uses your and your customer's location to calculate whether or not tax is applicable and, if so, how much. More on our Quaderno integration here.
Use Mixpanel for geographical tracking (any plan)
Mixpanel is an advanced analytics platform for mobile and web that will allow you to pull reports on student location. Much like the previous option, you would keep charging directly through Thinkific's checkout process, charging a little extra to cover your tax. You would then run the Mixpanel location report and cross-reference the report with your purchasers. You would need to research the taxes owed across those regions since Mixpanel would not hold that information. Learn more about Mixpanel here.
Integrate with another checkout system via Zapier (Pro + Growth plan and higher)
Our Pro + Growth plan Zapier integration allows you to take payment via an external checkout system and have users and enrolments automatically created on Thinkific. This means you'll be able to integrate with a checkout system that will charge tax dynamically depending on you or your customer's location. Some good examples of apps designed for this purpose are Quaderno and Taxamo. More on our Zapier integration here.
Set up your own integration via our API (Pro + Growth plan and higher)
If you'd prefer to set up your own checkout process, and have the developer resources available for this, then you're also able to build your own checkout integration via our public API. More on our public API here.