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This article describes how Subscript polls taxes from your General Ledger before sending invoices, more relevant if you have a third-party tax tool in your stack, as Anrok or Avalara. If you want to learn more about taxes in Subscript in general (including the option to calculate taxes within Subscript), refer to How to add taxes to your invoices instead.

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The integration with third-party tax tools (as Anrok or Avalara) is done through your General Ledger (Xero, Quickbooks or Netsuite) through a mechanism called tax polling.

How it works, in steps:

• Prior to sending your invoices, Subscript saves the invoice to the General Ledger.
• This action triggers your your third-party tool (that is connected to your GL) to add the taxes, according to the rules you configured during this tax tool implementation, your customer location and so on.
• In the background, Subscript sets a “tax polling” process, to retrieve the taxes added to your GL invoice when this is completed.
• This process keeps on running (which can take seconds to minutes, depending on the tool and the performance of this tool at the time) to bring the taxes to the Subscript invoice before sending it. If it’s taking too long, Subscript will retry to poll taxes at a later time (learn more), still before your invoices are sent.

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Noting that you don’t need to wait for your taxes to be polled to Subscript to send your invoices. Once you hit Send (or you set the invoice to be auto-sent), Subscript will take care of the process and ensure your taxes are in before sending the invoice.

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This system offers two advantages over other mechanisms:

• As mentioned above, you don't need to wait for the taxes to be processed/polled back, as in other tools we heard of; you send your invoice or schedule it to be sent, and when the taxes are in there (and just then) Subscript will send them.
• It is tax-tool agnostic; so if you eventually decide to start with Xero only, no tax tool, or switch between tax calc vendors, there are no changes in Subscript needed. The setup is only done in Xero, and you're good to go.