Bookkeeping and Accounting Setup
Assess whether your new business has a bookkeeping system, chart of accounts, and process to keep clean records from the start.
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For founders, new owners, and anyone starting out
Sales Tax Registration Readiness
Screen whether your products, services, and locations create a sales-tax registration duty as you launch, and what to confirm before collecting.
4 guided steps
Private in your browser
Official guidance links
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Your free guided checker
Answer a few quick questions below. It is private - nothing is submitted or stored - and takes about a minute.
Informational business-formation diagnostic only; not legal, tax, accounting, or investment advice. Confirm entity, tax, and state decisions with a qualified attorney and CPA.
The questions this tool walks you through
Here is what the checker asks and why each step matters. Prefer to talk it through? Contact us and we will help directly.
Do you sell tangible goods, or a service your state names as taxable, rather than a service that is generally exempt?
Most states tax physical goods by default; services are usually exempt unless the state lists them (repair, installation, digital, and data services are common exceptions) - so the product-versus-service line is the first thing that decides whether sales tax applies at all.
Confirm your offering is exempt; no registration until taxability changes.
Official guidance: Official state tax agency directory
Do you make those taxable sales yourself - direct to buyers through your own site, store, or invoices - rather than only through a marketplace like Amazon or Etsy that collects tax for you?
Under marketplace-facilitator laws now in nearly every state, platforms like Amazon, Etsy, and eBay collect and remit sales tax on the sales they process - so if every sale runs through them you may owe nothing directly, but any direct channel is yours to handle.
Confirm the marketplace collects for you; register only if you add direct sales.
Official guidance: Official state tax agency directory
Do you have a physical presence in the state where you operate - an office, store, warehouse, stored inventory, or employees?
Physical presence creates "nexus," an obligation to register and collect, in your home state from your very first taxable sale - this is the oldest and clearest trigger, and it applies before any sales-threshold analysis.
Register in your home state before you make your first taxable sale.
Official guidance: Official state tax agency directory
Do you ship taxable sales into other states where you have no office or staff, in volumes that are climbing toward roughly $100,000 a year or 200 transactions in any one of them?
Since the 2018 Wayfair decision, states can require out-of-state sellers to register once they cross an economic-nexus threshold - commonly around $100,000 in sales or 200 transactions per state, though the exact figure varies and some states have dropped the transaction count, so confirm each state.
Track sales by state and register as you approach each economic-nexus threshold. Confirm your offering is exempt; no registration until taxability changes.
Official guidance: Official state tax agency directory
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