Share tax rates with a tax profile
A tax profile is one set of tax rates that several organisations can use. Set the rates up once, give the profile to the organisations that should follow it, and when a rate changes you roll that change out from a single place instead of repeating it in every organisation.
It is most useful if you run more than one company, or if you are an accountant looking after a number of clients who all charge the same rates.
If you only have one organisation, you do not need this. Use Manage tax rates instead.
Before you begin
- For your own organisations, go to Settings → Tax profiles.
- If you run an accountancy practice, your practice has its own profiles: open the practice and choose the Tax profiles tab. Practice profiles can be given to your client organisations even though they are on different accounts.
- You need the Manage tax rates permission, and you need it in each organisation you give the profile to — not just on the profile itself.
The one thing to understand first
A profile hands rates out. It never quietly rewrites anybody's tax.
When you give a profile to an organisation, that organisation gets its own copies of the rates and owns them from then on. Its invoices, reports and VAT return work exactly as before — nothing in day-to-day use changes, and nobody needs to know a profile exists.
Later, when you change a rate in the profile, nothing happens to anyone until you say so. You are shown the organisations that use the rate and you choose which of them should follow, and when.
Creating a profile
Select New tax profile, give it a name, and choose where its rates come from:
| Start from | Use it when |
|---|---|
| A country's standard rates | The usual choice. You get our standard rate set for that country to adjust as you like. |
| An organisation you already have set up | You have one company set up the way you want and would like the others to match. Its current rates are copied. |
| Nothing | You would rather add every rate by hand. |
The country cannot be changed later
A profile belongs to one country, and that is fixed when you create it. Only organisations in that country can be given the profile — a UK profile cannot be given to an Irish company, because their rates are not the same thing.
If the organisation you want is not offered when you try to add it, this is almost always why. Check the country on the organisation's own details page, and if it differs, create a profile for that country instead.
Giving a profile to an organisation
Open the profile and use Add an organisation at the bottom of the page.
Rates the organisation already has are matched and kept. This matters more than it sounds. Most organisations already hold a standard set of VAT rates from when they were created, so a straightforward copy would leave them with two "Standard Rate 20%" entries and a confusing choice on every invoice line. Instead Sales Scribe recognises the rates that are already there and links them to the profile, and only adds the ones that are genuinely missing.
The message after you add tells you what happened — how many existing rates matched and stayed as they were, and how many were added.
If two of the organisation's rates look equally like a profile rate, Sales Scribe does not guess. It adds a new rate rather than silently re-pointing the wrong one, and says so.
When a rate changes — for example VAT goes from 20% to 21%
As with an ordinary tax rate, this is not an edit. A rate that organisations are already using cannot be changed in place, because that would rewrite what their invoices charged.
- Open the profile, find the rate, and select Replace.
- Enter the new percentage and the date it starts.
- Save.
At this point nothing has changed for any organisation. The profile now has the new rate scheduled, and a pending change appears at the top of the profile page listing every organisation that uses the old rate.
- Tick the organisations that should take the change and select Apply to selected, or use Apply to all if they all should.
Each organisation you apply to gets exactly the same treatment as if you had opened its own tax settings and replaced the rate by hand: the old rate ends the day before the new one starts, its existing documents are untouched, and the change is recorded in that organisation's audit trail.
You do not have to do it all at once. A pending change stays on the profile page until every organisation has taken it, and the list shows exactly who has and who has not. Organisations you add to the profile later are added to the list too, so nobody is left behind on an old rate.
When an organisation is skipped
Applying a change does not always succeed everywhere, and Sales Scribe tells you why rather than failing silently or giving up on the rest.
| Reason shown | What it means |
|---|---|
| Overridden | Somebody changed that rate inside the organisation itself. The organisation's own decision is left alone — see below. |
| No permission | You do not have permission to change tax rates in that organisation. The others are still updated. |
| Failed | Something went wrong for that organisation only. It will be tried again next time you apply. |
Only organisations marked Applied are finished. Everything else is looked at again each time you apply, so if a permission is granted or an override removed, simply applying again picks it up.
Overrides — the organisation always has the final say
An organisation can change a rate it received from a profile. It is allowed to: the organisation is responsible for its own tax, not the profile.
When that happens the rate is marked as overridden, the profile stops pushing changes into it, and the profile page shows you how many rates each organisation has taken over. That way you are never surprised by an organisation quietly ignoring a change, and Sales Scribe never quietly undoes a decision somebody made deliberately.
Removing an organisation, or deleting a profile
- Remove an organisation from the profile and it keeps every rate it has. Its documents depend on them, so they are never taken away. It simply stops receiving changes. If you add it back later, its rates are recognised again rather than duplicated.
- Delete a profile only once no organisation is using it. Remove them first — this is deliberate, so a profile cannot disappear from under organisations that depend on it.
Suggested defaults
A profile can suggest which rate should be the default for sales and for purchases. These are applied when an organisation first joins the profile, and after that the organisation owns them — changing the suggestion later does not reach back into organisations that have already joined.
Important notes
- A profile holds rates only. VAT registration, VAT numbers, schemes and return periods belong to each organisation and are never shared — see VAT registration and territory.
- Nothing about invoicing, reporting or the VAT return changes for an organisation because it follows a profile. Documents already issued are never recalculated.
- Every change applied to an organisation appears in that organisation's own audit trail, including that it came from a shared profile.