Product
Correct tax on every sale, or no sale
The tax engine decides which tax applies to each sale from where your customer is, what you sell and where you're registered. It explains every decision, and when it can't be sure, it stops the sale instead of guessing.
How a decision is made
For each sale, the engine works through the same steps, with the rules valid on the date of the sale:
- Classify the customer. A customer with a valid tax ID is a business; everyone else is a consumer.
- Locate the customer from the evidence: billing address, IP address country, card country and other signals. For a business, the country of its validated tax ID wins.
- Choose the regime: your home country's rules, the EU One-Stop Shop, reverse charge for cross-border business sales, a US state's sales tax, or a country's scheme for foreign sellers.
- Check your registration there, then pick the rate for the product's tax category and compute the tax with exact integer arithmetic.
The result is a quote with the lines, the totals, the notes the invoice needs and a rule trace: every rule used, with its version.
What it handles
Location evidence
Consumer sales need enough evidence that agrees. When the evidence conflicts, the regime's rule decides: the majority wins, the billing address wins, or the sale stops.
Reverse charge
Business customers with a valid tax ID get reverse charge where the rules allow it. The invoice is issued without the tax and says why, in the wording the jurisdiction requires.
Tax ID checks
VAT IDs are checked with the official registers, and the results are kept as evidence for the sale.
Fails closed
No verified rate, conflicting evidence, a blocked jurisdiction or a missing registration stops a new sale with a clear reason. Customers can join a waitlist for their country instead.
Rule trace
Every tax line links to the rules that produced it, with their versions and sources, so you can show your working to an adviser or an auditor.
Quotes API
The same engine checkout uses is available to your own code: quote a sale without making it, for your own checkout or a price preview.
The knowledge base behind it
Knowing how a seller of digital products must register, charge, invoice and file in each jurisdiction is the core of Ownrecord. We research and maintain it; you use it and never have to edit it.
- Every rule is a record with its sources, a confidence level, open questions and a date by which it must be reviewed again.
- Records move from researched to cross-checked by an independent review, then to reviewed by a person. Live sales use only reviewed or verified records.
- Coverage grows in levels: rates and thresholds first, then registration, then filing and invoicing.
- Rates and thresholds are swept before 1 January and 1 July each year, and the most important jurisdictions are researched again every quarter.
The knowledge base has researched 97 jurisdictions so far. See what's published, with sources and review dates, on the jurisdictions pages.
Rules, not advice
Ownrecord gives you the rules with their sources and review dates, as a tool. It isn't tax or legal advice, and you remain responsible for the tax on your sales.