Heartbeat integrates with Stripe Tax to help you automatically collect sales tax, VAT, or GST from your payments, both memberships and one-time payments. Follow the steps below to enable and configure Stripe Tax for your Heartbeat account:
Set Up Stripe Tax
You can automatically collect sales tax, VAT, or GST from all payments processed via Stripe Tax Integration in Heartbeat. You no longer have to worry about manually calculating and collecting taxes from your customers. Stripe Tax takes care of it all for you.
Before you can start collecting taxes, you need to complete the following steps in your Stripe Dashboard:
Confirm your business's origin address: This is essential for determining applicable tax rates.
Select a default tax category: Choose a category that best represents your product or service.
Register to collect taxes in the appropriate jurisdictions: Add a registration for each place where you're registered to collect tax. If you aren't registered anywhere, leave this empty and no tax is added.
Then, in Heartbeat, go to Settings > Revenue > Settings and click Enable Stripe Tax. Under Step 1: Stripe Tax Setup, click Mark as Complete.
Select a Tax Mode:
You will need to choose between two tax modes for your payments:
Inclusive Tax
Definition: Tax is included in the final price displayed to your customers.
Use Case: Recommended for B2C purchases outside the US.
Note: This setting cannot be changed after being set.
Exclusive Tax
Definition: Tax is added on top of the price you define.
Use Case: Common for B2B transactions or B2C transactions within the US.
Note: This setting cannot be changed after being set.
Choose your mode under Step 2: Select a Tax Mode and click Enable Stripe Tax. The section then shows Enabled with your tax mode.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do buyers see "Unknown error encountered" at checkout?
This happens when Stripe tax is enabled in Heartbeat but Stripe Tax hasn't been activated on your connected Stripe account. At checkout, Heartbeat asks Stripe to calculate the tax, Stripe refuses, and the buyer sees Unknown error encountered. Checkout stops before a payment is created, so nobody is charged and nothing shows as failed in Stripe.
To fix it, log in to your connected Stripe account, open dashboard.stripe.com/settings/tax, confirm your head office address, pick a default tax category if Stripe asks for one, and save. Buyers can then check out again.