Recently I’ve started working with tax exempt clients. To build orders for clients, I manually add a new order within WooCommerce. I’ve been fighting against the automated taxes attempting to build orders for these clients. I think the plugin works great at managing sales taxes, but for these exempt clients I need to be able to remove the taxes. Is there already support for this and am I just missing it? Or would it be insanely difficult to add it?
Thanks for taking the time to explain your use case in detail. I can see how manually creating orders for tax exempt clients becomes frustrating when automated taxes keep getting applied, especially when everything else about WooCommerce Tax is working well for standard sales.
At the moment, WooCommerce core and the WooCommerce Tax plugin do not include a built in option to automatically mark specific customers as tax exempt across all scenarios. To consistently handle tax exempt users, you would need to use a supported third party plugin or custom code that applies tax exemption logic before order totals are calculated. This is the recommended approach when you have a recurring need to exempt certain customers from tax calculations.
If having first class tax exemption support directly within WooCommerce Tax would better match your workflow, you are very welcome to submit this as a feature request. Our product team actively reviews feedback submitted through the feature request board: https://woocommerce.com/feature-requests/tax/.
Hi @lovingbro, Thanks so much for your quick and thoughtful reply. I did purchase one of these plugins from the Woo extensions list. They all seem to have an issue when it comes to manually adding an order by an admin or shop manager. the first review on the one you listed even addresses this:
I think the issue is this: The manual “add order” area in the admin window does not connect with these plugins. And after the order is created and assigned to a customer, it goes into “pending” status and cannot be modified. This appears to prevent removing tax via a button (plugin) at checkout because it bypasses the cart stage. Do you know of any workarounds, plugins or other methods I can try?
I am also working with Jetpack CRM and if I use this to remove the tax, it does not have any impact for the customer.
I am also running into an issue where customers can only pay at this stage, they can’t specify a shipping address… maybe that’s not something we can address here.
Thanks again for your help, if you have any additional ideas or advice, I am open to suggestions.
cheers
This reply was modified 2 months, 4 weeks ago by Jason Houge.
This reply was modified 2 months, 4 weeks ago by Jason Houge.
When an order is created manually in the admin, it does not pass through the cart or checkout flow, so tax exemption logic from plugins is not applied in the same way. This is why you can add products without tax initially, but once taxes are calculated, the usual exemption tools are not available.
A practical workaround that many store owners use is to let the tax calculate as normal when creating the manual order, then add a negative fee to offset it. You can add a fee line with a title like “Tax exempt” and enter the exact tax amount as a negative value. This removes the tax from the order total while keeping everything visible and consistent in order emails, reports, and WooCommerce analytics.
For the part where customers can only pay and cannot enter or update their shipping address, this is also a limitation of the pay for order flow. A common workaround is to fully set the billing and shipping address in the admin before sending the payment link. If you need more flexibility, plugins such as WooCommerce Order Delivery or checkout field management extensions can help control address handling, or you can use an invoice style plugin that sends the customer through a full checkout experience instead of the pay for order screen.
Thanks again @lovingbro for your valuable feedback! I did attempt the fee method, but this applies the fee before taxes and therefore does not reliably remove the tax as it is also impacted by the tax.
I am submitting a feature request. I do think this is a valuable function since many businesses who shop online require tax exemption and there seems to be no clean workaround for back end order creation as yet.
Thank you again for the detailed discussion and for submitting the feature request. We really appreciate you taking the time to share this feedback.
If you don’t have any further questions at this point, we’ll go ahead and mark this thread as resolved. If you found the support helpful, we’d also appreciate a quick review here when you have a moment.
Please feel free to open a new thread anytime if you need further assistance.
Hi @jasonhouge I am following up on your feature request here to get a better understanding of what if happening on your site. The customers you are exempting from paying tax, is this from Automated Tax Rates or its from Tax Rates you have manually set up on your site?
We might be able to provide additional information based on the response you will provide concerning this 🙂
Hi @thelmachido, So I don’t use any manual tax system. I personally wouldn’t know how to find all of the variations across the state. I use Woocommerce Tax to automate my taxes, and because it does this, it imposes taxes on every order, and I have not found a work around that will prevent this for clients who require tax exemption.
Thank you!
Also I should note, while yes there are a few plugins that DO provide tax exemption from the front end, Most of what I sell are services that the customer cannot piece together from the front end. Things that require amounts of time or variations that occur during the building of an order that they could not otherwise forsee. So nearly all of my billing is handled on the backend via the “Add Order” page. This is where it gets complicated.
This reply was modified 2 months, 3 weeks ago by Jason Houge.
This reply was modified 2 months, 3 weeks ago by Jason Houge. Reason: clarity
Hi @jasonhouge sorry for the delay in response here, I wanted to make sure we provide you with information that will help you move forward.
I think the plugin works great at managing sales taxes, but for these exempt clients I need to be able to remove the taxes. Is there already support for this and am I just missing it? Or would it be insanely difficult to add it?
With this plugin, once you provide the customers shipping details on the manual order tax should be calculated as expected similar to what you would see on the front-end. Here is a short video
Just to clarify, if you have automated taxes options enabled this means tax is added based on your local tax regulations. This means the customer will be exempted from paying tax if they are not supposed to be paying tax according to your local tax regulations.
So another question would be are there customers that under normal circumstances should be exempted from paying tax according to your local regulations that are paying tax when you create a manual order?
