What Is the Shopify Tax Report?
The Shopify Tax Report lists the tax collected on each individual order, with no grouping applied, so every row is a single transaction. For each order it shows the date, the order name, the total tax collected, and the sales that sat behind that tax, broken into taxable sales, non-taxable sales, and total sales.
Its defining feature is the five-slot tax structure. A single order can carry more than one tax, for example a state tax plus a county tax, or GST plus a provincial tax, so the report holds up to five tax titles and their five matching amounts. Each slot names the tax and shows what was charged for it on that order.
Because it stays at the order level and keeps every tax component separate, this report is the one to reach for when you or your accountant need to see exactly how a specific order's tax was made up, rather than a rolled-up figure by month, state, or product.
Which Fields Are Included in the Shopify Tax Report?
These fields let you read the full tax makeup of each order and tie it back to the sales that generated it.
You can customize the pre-made report by adding, removing, or rearranging columns so it matches how you review orders before filing.
Important Insights You Can Find in This Report
Which orders carry stacked tax components rather than a single tax line?
Scan for orders where Tax 2 through Tax 5 are populated instead of just Tax 1. Those are your multi-jurisdiction orders, for example a destination that applies state plus county plus city tax, or an order carrying GST plus a provincial tax. These are the orders most likely to hide a setup mistake, so check that the stacked components actually match the tax rules for each order's destination before you rely on the totals.
Is the Tax amount proportional to Taxable Sales on each order?
Line up Taxable Sales against the Tax column order by order. An order with meaningful taxable sales but little or no tax collected points to a rate that did not apply, a missed exemption rule, or a tax configuration gap for that destination. Pulling the specific order names lets you investigate the checkout tax setup rather than discovering the shortfall at filing time.
How much of your Total Sales is landing as Non-Taxable across the period?
Compare Non-Taxable Sales against Total Sales over the date range. A larger non-taxable share can be legitimate, driven by exempt customers or exempt product types, but a growing share is worth a second look. It can also signal that tax should have been charged in a region where you now have an obligation, which is easier to catch here than in a summary that hides the order detail.
THE ANALYST'S READ: The Signal Most Merchants Miss
Because this report is order-level and does not strip out cancelled orders the way the Tax report without cancelled orders does, the total in the Tax column is not automatically the figure you remit. Cancelled or reversed orders can still contribute tax rows, so a straight sum can sit slightly above your real liability. If your filing number needs to reflect only completed activity, reconcile this report against the cancelled-order variant before treating the total as final.
The second thing worth reading is the shape of the five tax slots across the period. If almost every order uses only Tax 1, and then a cluster of orders suddenly fills three or four slots, that is usually a destination or tax-setup change rather than random variation. It is worth checking whether those stacked orders share a shipping region or a date range, since that tells you whether a new jurisdiction rule kicked in or a configuration change quietly altered how tax is being applied.
How Can You Automate the Shopify Tax Report?
Open the pre-made Tax Report in Report Pundit and the columns are already set, so you can run it as is or adjust the fields first. Set your date range to match your filing period, apply a filter if you want to narrow the view, and save it. From there you can schedule it to send on a recurring basis, daily, weekly, or monthly, and deliver it by email or to Google Sheets or Google Drive, so the same tax breakdown reaches you, your team, or your accountant without being rebuilt each time. You can also export it as CSV, Excel, or PDF.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does the Shopify Tax Report show?
It shows the tax collected on each individual order, one order per row, along with the taxable, non-taxable, and total sales behind that tax and each separate tax component applied to the order.
Why does the report have five tax titles and five tax amounts?
A single order can have more than one tax applied to it, such as a state tax plus a county tax, or GST plus a provincial tax. The five title and amount slots let the report record each tax component on the order separately instead of merging them into one number.
What is the difference between the Shopify Tax Report and the Tax report without cancelled orders?
They share the same fields, but this Tax Report reflects order activity without automatically removing cancelled orders, while the Tax report without cancelled orders filters those out. Use this one for a complete order-level view, and the cancelled-order variant when you want a cleaner liability figure.
What is the difference between Taxable Sales, Non-Taxable Sales, and Total Sales here?
Taxable Sales is the portion of an order's sales that tax applied to, Non-Taxable Sales is the portion that was exempt, and Total Sales is the order's overall sales value. Seeing all three next to the Tax column shows you how much of each order was actually taxed.
Can I see tax grouped by state, country, or month instead of by order?
This report stays at the order level. For grouped views, use the Tax by State, Tax by Country, or Monthly Tax Summary reports, which aggregate the same tax data by those dimensions.