Budgeting
You can put a tax on an account or a subaccount, and you know why only one fits.
Tax is calculated on the account total and added on top, so **every price must be entered net** — see [edit a budget account](/kb/article/edit-a-budget-account).
Select the account and click **Taxes** in the account details.
Pick one from the dropdown. It offers only what is defined in Settings; the panel's settings icon opens those definitions without losing your place — see [define taxes](/kb/article/define-taxes) if the one you need is not there.
**An account can carry only one tax.** Choosing a second replaces the first rather than adding to it.
That is a deliberate constraint rather than a limitation: a single line of cost is subject to one rate. A line that genuinely attracts two different rates is two lines, and splitting it is the accurate way to budget it.
Choose the delete entry in the dropdown. Clearing the tax never warns — nothing else depends on it.
**Subaccounts can differ.** Unlike fringes, supplements and extra costs, **tax can be set per subaccount**. An engagement whose phases are billed differently — a fee subject to VAT, a reimbursement not — can carry that distinction without splitting the account.
**Most invoices from outside the production carry VAT** — suppliers, rental houses, studios, post facilities, freelancers. Tax is the normal case for bought-in cost, not an exception, and the Taxes panel is where it goes.
The case worth naming separately is the self-employed, because it is the one that gets reversed. Freelancers and companies invoicing for their work carry **no wage fringes** but are normally subject to VAT — and fringes on a freelancer inflates the budget with contributions nobody will pay — see [budget personnel and wage earners](/kb/article/budget-personnel-and-wage-earners).
**It is the cash flow that needs this.** At a full refund a tax changes no total, which makes applying it look optional. It is not: applying it is what puts that account's VAT into the **cash flow**. The refundable share becomes an input-VAT movement, timed by the same rule that times the cost itself, and netted against the output VAT once per reporting interval. So an untaxed account is not a harmless omission — the cost stays right and the cash goes wrong. The production pays that VAT months before it comes back, and nothing shows it. Give the account a [cash flow rule](/kb/article/set-a-cashflow-rule-on-an-account) so the timing lands somewhere.
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