Organize product, service, customer, delivery, and exemption facts before deciding whether sales tax should be charged.
Answer a few quick questions below. It is private - nothing is submitted or stored - and takes about a minute.
Informational multistate tax screening only; state and local rules vary and must be verified for the applicable year and jurisdiction.
Here is what the checker asks and why each step matters. Prefer to talk it through? Contact us and we will help directly.
Most states start from the premise that tangible goods are taxable unless a specific exemption applies, so this is the first fork. Judge the offering by its true object - what the customer is really paying for - rather than by an incidental medium such as a manual, a disc, or a shipped token. The common trap is to treat electronically delivered software or streaming as tangible goods; those are analyzed separately as digital products, not as tangible personal property.
Use the interactive tool above to see how this applies to your situation.
Official guidance: Streamlined Sales Tax business resources
Category exemptions are product-based, not customer-based; a commonly exempt product stays exempt regardless of who buys it, but the categories differ state to state.
Confirm the product exemption state by state and document why each sale is exempt; the categories are defined uniformly in the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement Library of Definitions but each state adopts and conditions them differently.
Official guidance: Streamlined Sales Tax business resources
When a taxable good is bundled with a nontaxable service or item for one price, many states tax the whole bundle unless the components are separately stated - so a clean single item is the simplest case.
Register and collect where you have nexus; under South Dakota v. Wayfair, 585 U.S. 162 (2018) a remote seller must collect once it crosses a state's economic-nexus threshold, and tangible goods generally source to the destination. Map each component of the bundle to its own taxability and sourcing before you set rates; under Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement bundled-transaction rules a single price can make the whole charge taxable unless the components are separately stated.
Official guidance: Streamlined Sales Tax business resources
Digital goods and SaaS are the fastest-moving corner of sales tax; some states tax them as tangible property, some tax only specific categories, and some do not tax them at all.
Run a state-by-state taxability check for digital products and SaaS before you turn on tax; the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement defines 'specified digital products' and 'prewritten computer software,' but states adopt those categories inconsistently.
Official guidance: Streamlined Sales Tax business resources
Most states tax services only when specifically enumerated (data processing, repair, installation, telecom, and similar), so a pure professional service is commonly nontaxable - but a handful of states tax services broadly.
Confirm your service is not enumerated as taxable in each state where you have customers; most states tax services only when specifically enumerated (data processing, repair, installation, and similar). Map each service and any attached goods or software to its own taxability before you set rates; bundling a taxable item with a service can pull the whole charge into tax under Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement bundled-transaction rules.
Official guidance: Streamlined Sales Tax business resources
Send us your situation and one of our senior CPAs will review it with you - fixed fee, no surprises.
Contact Us