We are having difficulty managing comps for items that include a flat excise tax. We are a bar and bottle shop. Bottles sold at retail have both sales tax (% of price) and excise tax (flat amount based on size of item). We have been able to program in that tax structure to the items. We track inventory for bottles. We use retail bottle inventory for both providing donations and to stock the bar. In prior POS, we discounted those comps, and that would record the "sale". We can not do that in Toast, because it can not discount the excise tax. Toast suggested we create "Other" payment subcategories for this purpose, for example, "Donation" and "Bar Stock". This does work, in that nothing has to be paid, the sale is tracked, the inventory is adjusted, etc. However, later reporting for tax purposes and bookkeeping is difficult, because it reports these amounts as revenue and tax collected, while we need to create reports that don't include this as revenue or tax collected. Of course, we can do large dumps of all the transactions into spreadsheets and search and manipulate the data to correct this, but it is time consuming and prone to error. We have not been able to find another way to do this that works better. Ironically, we switched to Toast in part because the Rep claimed it could handle this situation better than our prior POS and workflow. Maybe someone else has a similar set up and has found a better way to generate the necessary reports?
