Stripe Tax Location Report

What a location report shows

Each active registration has its own location report, reached from the Locations page of the Stripe Dashboard. You choose the location, then the frequency and the period, and the choices on offer are set by that location's filing rules: monthly, quarterly, annual or fiscal annual.

The layout follows the filing form rather than the transaction data. For US states, Stripe says that can mean category-by-category breakdowns. Its examples: California separates sales of food, prescriptions and certain other goods into their own schedules, Washington separates retail sales from service revenue, and New York applies a clothing and footwear exemption to New York City sales. A single tax transaction can affect more than one line on the form.

The data starts on January 1, 2023 for US states (December 1, 2022 for New York), and location reports support fiscal annual periods from 2024 onward. For older data, Stripe points you to the itemized and summarized exports.

What it leaves out

Stripe is direct about the limits. Location reports exist only for the US and Canada. They support sales and use tax types only. You can only view them in the Dashboard, so if you need a file for your records, Stripe suggests the itemized or summarized export for the same jurisdiction and period.

The bigger limit is scope. A location report is built entirely from your Stripe transaction data. Stripe says it doesn't account for business-specific adjustments like credits, prepayments, use tax owed on purchases, or transactions that happened outside Stripe, and it doesn't include imported transactions. Its advice is to treat the report as a starting point and always review it before filing.

It also only covers transactions Stripe Tax calculated. Invoices with manual or no tax, raw charges without an invoice, and anything that bypassed Stripe Tax won't appear, even when the same dollars show up elsewhere in Stripe.

Refunds land in the original period

This is the behavior that surprises people after they file. Stripe says location reports "include refunds associated with an original transaction in the same period as the original transaction, even if the refund occurred much later," and that Stripe "doesn't allow the reassigning of refunds to alternate periods."

So refund a July sale in November, and the July quarter's location report shows less tax due than it did when you filed from it. The November quarter's report doesn't show the refund at all. Itemized and summarized exports do the opposite: a refund is a reversal row dated when the refund happened. Stripe's automated filing also deducts refunds in the period they occurred.

One more warning applies to refunds made through the Tax API. If you refund a tax amount so the total tax is no longer proportional to the subtotal, Stripe says tax reporting can be unreliable, and recommends fully reversing the transaction and creating a new one.

Why it won't match your exports or QuickBooks

Stripe's reconciliation guide says there is no column-by-column equivalence between location reports and the exports, and that in some cases the two won't agree even when nothing is wrong. The causes it lists are worth knowing by heart.

Time zone: location reports always use UTC, while exports use the time zone you choose. Periods: location reports use fixed filing periods, and a few US states use fiscal years that don't start in January. The District of Columbia runs October to September, Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee run July to June, and New York runs March to February. Form logic: some states recompute the tax shown on the form by applying the official rate to a derived taxable base, rather than summing the tax collected line by line.

Timing can shift closed periods too. If you calculate tax in one period and commit the tax transaction in a later one through the Tax API, location reports record the liability against the calculation date while exports use the commit date, so each later commit can change a past period's location report.

QuickBooks adds one more layer. Stripe Tax reports use accrual timing: tax is counted when an invoice finalizes or a payment completes, not when the customer pays. A liability account fed by synced sales, refunds and your payments to the state is a different record again, so expect named differences rather than a perfect match.

States with extra considerations

Stripe flags additional location report considerations for eight states: Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee and Washington. Each links to its own notes in Stripe's US tax collection documentation. If you're registered in any of them, read that state's notes before you rely on the report for a return.

If an accountant prepares your returns, Stripe suggests inviting them as a team member so they can open location reports themselves, and recommends the View Only role for access to tax reports.