2557594 - Customer Tax Exemption Certificates (with US specifics)

Tax Exemption Certificates are a special form of tax exemption and not applicable in every country. They are issued for a specific reason for transactions between specified business partners, in contrast to a normal tax exemption which is valid in general. Hence the tax exemption certificate is only taken into account in transactions between these specified business partners

SAP Business ByDesign

Tax Exemption Certificates within ByDesign are currently only available as Customer Tax Exemption Certificates, and can therefore only be used between a customer and a company. They can be limited for a certain period of time and even up to a certain amount.

There exist different types of usage for tax exemption certificates: single usage (only applicable once) and continuous usage (applicable several times till the validity expires or till the exempt amount is used up). The limitation to a total tax exemption amount is not applicable within the United States.

When creating a customer tax exemption certificate, you must set its validity period and the appropriate certificate type (Direct Payment Certificate, Exempt Organization Certificate, Exempt Use Certificate, or Resale Certificate) in combination with the type of usage.

A customer tax exemption certificate being a kind of tax exemption, the corresponding exemption reason needs to be provided as well. For the United States this can be one of the following: Agricultural Production, Charitable Organization, Direct Pay Permit,  Foreign Diplomat, Industrial Production / Manufacturing, Multiple Points of Use, Religious or Educational Organization, Resale, Federal Government, State or Local Government, or Tribal Government, or an Other reason not further specified.

For a customer tax exemption certificate for the United States, you furthermore have to specify the state in which it is valid. Please note that a tax exemption certificate can only be used in a transaction if it is created for the same state where the account is located.

Creation of a Customer Tax Exemption certificate
A Customer Tax Exemption Certificate can be created from within the account, or on the fly in a sales transaction document from the tax details section. Note that before a customer tax exemption certificate can be used, it must be activated.

Usage of a Customer Tax Exemption Certificate within Tax Calculation

Tax calculation automatically checks whether a customer tax exemption certificate can be used within a transaction. This depends on the involved parties (company and account), the tax date of the transaction and the validity period of the customer tax exemption certificate and other facts such as the certificate type and its usage so far.

As the customer tax exemption certificate types "Direct Payment Certificate - continuous" and "Exempt Organization Certificate - continuous" always apply, they can be determined automatically by tax calculation. For all the other certificate types you need the information from the customer whether the certificate can be used for the current transaction. So they have to be assigned manually in a sales transaction.

During tax calculation the manual set customer tax exemption certificate will be validated and in case it is not necessary or not possible to use this one, it will be discarded and the user informed accordingly. Reasons for discarding a manual set customer tax exemption certificate might be, for example: it is not valid at that point of time (check tax date in the document and the validity period of the customer tax exemption certificate), it has already been applied before in case of single usage, or the manual set customer tax exemption certificate is not necessary because the transaction is exempt due to other reasons (due to missing nexus or general tax-exemption of product or business partner).

KBA , SRD-FIN-TAX , Tax Management , How To