TripWorks lets you add up to 20 taxes and surcharges to what you sell — a percentage like sales tax or VAT, or a flat surcharge like a trail, dock, or fuel fee. You control which items and channels each applies to, and whether it's shown separately at checkout or baked into the price. Find them under Setup Get paid Taxes & Surcharges.

You have a fixed set of 20 slots — you don't add new ones, you configure and turn on the slots you need.

Configure a tax or surcharge

Select a row to open its settings:

• Enable this tax — turn it on to start collecting. Turning it off keeps the configuration but stops collecting it.
• Label — the name shown on receipts and during checkout (for example, Sales Tax).
• How it's calculated — choose one:
• Percentage — a variable percentage of the price, like sales tax or VAT.
• Fixed amount — a flat charge. Choose whether it applies once per trip or once per booking/guest.

Where it applies

Each tax or surcharge can apply broadly or narrowly:

• Applies to everything, or Limit to specific items — pick the exact activities, products, and add-ons it's collected on.
• Booking channels — E-commerce, Direct, Offline resellers, and OTAs, each all-or-specific. So you can collect a tax on your website and direct bookings but not through an OTA, for example.

How it's shown and counted

A tax's accounting options control how it appears to guests and in your reports:

• Display all-inclusive pricing — bake this tax into the ticket price shown from the start of checkout, instead of adding it at the end. Guests see the full price upfront (see below).
• Don't itemize — include it in the total without a separate line item.
• Include in revenue — count it as part of your business income (common for VAT) rather than a pass-through amount collected on behalf of a tax authority.
• Exempt by default on new trips — new bookings are created exempt from this tax, and you enable it manually per trip when it applies.

By default a tax is added on top at checkout. Turning on Display all-inclusive pricing for a tax bakes it into the shown price instead.

Why all-inclusive pricing matters

Showing the full price upfront — rather than surprising guests with fees at the end — builds trust and helps you meet price-transparency rules in many places (California SB-478, FTC guidance, EU consumer-protection law). A $50 ticket that becomes $57.50 at checkout can drive complaints and chargebacks; an all-inclusive $57.50 shown from the start avoids that.

When one tax is charged on another

Taxes don't normally stack: each one is calculated on the item's price, not on the other taxes. The one exception is Include in revenue, which decides the order TripWorks applies them in:

1. Taxes and surcharges with Include in revenue on are calculated first, on the item's price.
2. Taxes with Include in revenue off are calculated next, on the item's price plus the amounts from step 1.

So when a surcharge counts as revenue (a fuel or park surcharge, for example) and your sales tax doesn't, sales tax is charged on the surcharge too. That matches how most tax authorities treat a fee the business keeps. If you don't want sales tax on a surcharge, leave Include in revenue off for that surcharge. Two taxes in the same group never stack on each other.

Example: a $100 ticket with a 10% fuel surcharge (Include in revenue on) and 8% sales tax (Include in revenue off). The surcharge is $10. Sales tax is 8% of $110, or $8.80. The guest pays $118.80.

Taxes on reseller bookings

A reseller booking can show different tax than the same booking sold at your front desk, because of the reseller's Guest Payment Amount setting:

• Retail Amount: taxes are calculated on your full ticket price, the same as a walk-up sale.
• Wholesale Amount: the reseller's commission comes off the trip total, and when the commission is a percentage, percentage taxes are calculated on the price after the commission. A $100 ticket at 20% wholesale commission is taxed on $80, so 8% tax is $6.40 instead of $8.00. Flat-amount surcharges aren't reduced.

Each tax also has its own Booking channels setting. If a tax isn't set to apply to Offline resellers or OTAs, those bookings don't collect it at all. See Connect with resellers to check a reseller's setting.

Turn taxes on for an activity

Which taxes apply is also set per activity — each activity opts in to the account-level taxes it should assess. You set up the tax once (above), then enable it on the activities it applies to.

1. Go to Setup Activities and open the activity.
2. In the left sidebar under Pricing, select Taxes & Fees.
3. Select Add tax or surcharge and pick the ones to assess — each appears as a chip showing its rate. Remove one with the × on its chip.
4. Select Save.

GST, HST, PST, VAT, and other regional taxes

There's no separate toggle for a specific tax by name: every slot is a generic Label + Percentage tax, so GST, HST, PST, VAT, or any other region's tax is set up the exact same way as sales tax. Open a slot, label it (for example, GST or GST/HST), set How it's calculated to Percentage, enter your rate, choose where it applies, and enable it.

Canadian operators generally follow one of two patterns:

• One combined line: label a single slot something like GST/PST (or GST/HST) and enter the combined rate, if you'd rather guests see one line at checkout.
• Separate lines: a GST slot and a separate PST slot, each at its own rate, if you want them broken out individually on receipts and in reports.

If you sell both activities and retail items (gift shop, merchandise) and want GST tracked separately for each, you're not limited to one slot: set up a second GST slot labeled for the other revenue type (for example, GST (Activity) and GST (Retail)) and limit each to the right items under Limit to specific items.

Leave Include in revenue off for GST/HST/PST, the same as VAT: it's tax you collect on behalf of the government, not income, so it shouldn't count toward your revenue reports.

Examples

• Set up a single GST slot at 5%, applied to everything, shown as its own line at checkout (not baked into the price): the common setup for a Canadian operator that only sells activities.
• Combine GST and PST into one GST/PST slot at your province's combined rate, so guests see one tax line instead of two.
• Add a second GST slot to separate what you collect on activities from what you collect on retail/merchandise sales, for cleaner bookkeeping.

Frequently asked questions

Related

• Set your ticket prices
• The pricing breakdown on a trip