Charging taxes on events

The price that attendees see for an event on event pages and the portal site  does not include the tax. The total along with the tax will be presented to them on the registration form.

If you would like your event pages and portal site to show your attendees the price with the tax already included, you need to configure this as follows:

Whenever the tax feature is enabled, taxes will be clearly shown and defined on your customer's receipts. This also applies to tax rates of zero that need to be shown on the customer's receipt, as shared in the note box under step 3 above.

Dealing with Different Tax Regions for the Same Event

Normally, you would only need to collect a tax in the province, state, or region where you operate your business, and customers are normally charged tax on goods and services they buy in the region they are in, whether it is their home region or not.

For example, when a person from France visits a state in the US, they pay the tax applicable in that US state on any products or services they buy while there. This also applies to people crossing states within the US or provinces within Canada. The same can apply to online purchases too. If you are a US-based event provider and need to collect taxes as part of doing business in your state and someone from France registers for one of your virtual events, they would be charged the tax rate you need to collect for your region accordingly. Your business is in that particular state and you are streaming the event in that particular state; the person in France is making a choice to join you there virtually.

In this straightforward case, you would turn the tax feature on and collect the tax rate applicable to your region, regardless of who registers from any part of the world.

However, with the rise of virtual events, some event organizers want to charge their attendees differently, depending on where they are from, which is not easy and poses various challenges.

For example, if you try to show different tax rates and prices or ask people to choose their location and tax that applies to them, this can lead to registrants bypassing the objective by selecting the lowest price category. Likewise, with more people working online, living abroad, and having multiple addresses and currency payment cards, it can be very difficult to determine or control what tax rate may apply to each customer. Online e-commerce, governments, and service providers are struggling with these very challenges today.

Note: Corsizio, similar to other such event registration platforms, does not have a built-in tax feature that would provide conditional logic on the registration form based on a geographical address to determine what tax rate a registering person should be charged.

You have the option to either turn the tax feature on and charge everyone the same tax rate on an event or keep the tax feature off, adjust the price accordingly, and deal with the taxes you need to collect separately. Otherwise, you can create distinct versions of the same event for different regions to reflect the different tax rates. This is viable if you only have a few regions you are serving and you feel that you can control that people will register for the event version of their region. You can configure a different tax rate per event in a Corsizio account, but as stated above, you cannot configure multiple tax rates on the same event listing.

Therefore, one of the easiest ways to solve the dilemma of charging different tax rates on an event is not to use the tax feature and charge everyone the same inclusive price. Adjust your event price accordingly to offset the tax you will need to remit and create one event with the same price, inclusive of the tax, for everyone. You can also create a checkbox using the custom form fields for attendees to check if you need to know if they reside in your specific region. This will prevent registrants from questioning different prices and tax rates on an event and prevent the behavior where a person would always select whatever option produces the lowest cost. At the end of the year or every month, you can export the data and tally up the amount collected from your customers to figure out the percentage that would amount to the taxes you are responsible for paying to your government.

In summary, as businesses serve multiple regions with their online events and classes, it is most valuable to stick with one consistent and inclusive price that all your customers see and pay. Your organization's tax obligation to its local region would then be accounted for in the price (inclusively) and calculated at the time of tax submission manually based on your specific needs and criteria. Check with your tax advisor for the most accurate and up-to-date information regarding your tax obligations.