In certain jurisdictions, certain items may be charged a flat tax rate. Good examples would be a bottle deposit, or the nicotine tax in North Carolina. 

For any tax that is charged as a non-percentage, per item amount, Erply has a feature called “Beverage Containers.”

Enabling Beverage Containers on your Erply account

The first step is to submit a request to our support team to get beverage container tax functionality enabled on the account. 

Creating Beverage Container items

Once this is done, you will need to create a new non-stock item for each tax rate that needs to be applied. 

For example, say you have products that have a $5 tax, and products that have a $10 tax. 

You would create two items: 

One named “Five Dollar Tax” with a price of $5

One named “Ten Dollar Tax” with a price of $10. 

Note: Non-stock products can be created under the PIM Module. They do not hold stock, so they do not have an inventory to count.

We also recommend checking off the “tax free in all locations” for these new tax items. Most places that require these flat “Beverage Container” tax rates do not charge state sales tax.

Applying Beverage Container taxes to items in Erply

You’ll notice that when you open the product card for your new non-stock Beverage Container products, you now have a few new options at the top left:

Beverage container: Allow you to select the tax item to apply to the item you’re working with. 

Beverage container’s amount: The quantity of the tax item that should be added to the sale for each of the item you’re working with. Most often this will be 1.

Beverage container plugin

Does your Erply account have physical locations that sell beverage container taxed items, and physical locations that don’t sell beverage container taxed items?

If yes, you will need to add a plugin to your Erply account.

Add plugin to the POS

Open the POS Settings and select Configuration.

Scroll down to the Customization section and locate the Javascript plugin URL box. Paste the following code into the box:

Be sure to Save when you are done.

Add plugin in the back office

Navigate to the Retail Chain module and select Locations.

Click on a location that should not have the beverage container tax applied.

Scroll down to the Attributes tab. Click New to add a new attribute.

Fill in the following values:

Name: disable_automatic_beverage_containers

Type: int

Value: 1

Save this page when you are done.