Tax Posture

Scope

Tax work gets harder when it is detached from the transactions and entities it depends on. This guide keeps the public-safe operating view and excludes private filing or integration mechanics.

Generating obligations creates the standard deadlines for the selected tax year and current company entity. Keystone preserves tenant and entity scope on every generated deadline and reports generation failures in the modal without discarding the selected year.

Tax management, quarterly estimates, 1099s, financial obligations calendar, compliance calendar, annual reporting package, and sales tax management (nexus, jurisdiction rates, exemption certificates, remittance tracking).

Keystone automates only the jurisdictions and filing regimes marked supported in its published policy catalogs. Unsupported state estimates and filing-calendar combinations remain blocked with an operator-visible recovery action; Keystone does not invent rates, deadlines, or claim automated filing coverage for them.

The routed tax workspace uses the canonical tax/report permission contract, so the sidebar and tax action buttons stay aligned with the backend permission model.

The contextual tax/compliance workflow bar links Tax summary, Sales tax, Calendar, Obligations, Filing readiness, and Annual package wherever permissions allow. Use those links to reconcile setup, deadlines, readiness blockers, and evidence instead of inferring the next surface from unrelated sidebar groups.

The selected company entity travels with you across that workflow. Sales Tax requires an explicit entity selection and filters nexus registrations to it; creating a nexus record binds it to that same entity. A nexus shown for one legal entity is therefore never presented as readiness evidence for another entity’s compliance calendar.

Company Profile jurisdiction fields are only an operating-footprint prompt. They do not create nexus or claim that a business is registered. Use Configure tax registrations from Company Profile to open the selected entity’s Sales Tax nexus workflow and enter the authoritative registration, filing frequency, and effective-date evidence.

Filing handoff and direct-transport failures remain visible beside their retry controls. The message describes the business prerequisite or invalid input in operator language; a toast is supplementary and is not the only recovery evidence.

When the annual filing obligation exists, Filing Readiness includes Filing and payment evidence. Attach acknowledgements, filed returns, payment confirmations, or exception evidence there. Keystone stores them as internal documents subject to the normal retention, legal-hold, tenant-isolation, checksum, and audit controls.

Tax Management

Tax Rates

Tax rates apply to invoice calculations.

List tax rates:

Create tax rate:

Fields:

• name (required) – e.g., “California Sales Tax”
• jurisdiction (required) – e.g., “CA”
• rate_percentage (required) – 0.0 to 100.0
• is_default – boolean; setting this clears default from other rates

The default tax rate is automatically applied to new invoices unless the customer is tax-exempt.

Customer Tax Exemption

View tax status:

Update tax status:

Fields:

• tax_exempt – boolean

Tax-exempt customers are not charged tax on invoices.

Tax Bracket Sets

Tax brackets drive income tax estimation for quarterly estimates and the annual package.

Check bracket status (staleness):

Reports whether the current brackets are up-to-date for a given year and jurisdiction. The result is scoped to the signed-in tenant’s bracket sets only.

Check overall tax-table status:

Returns the current-year and next-year federal bracket status plus the signed-in tenant’s sales-tax freshness summary.

List bracket sets:

Create bracket set:

Fields:

• name (required)
• tax_year (required)
• jurisdiction – default:
• effective_date (required)
• expiry_date – optional
• bracket_data (required) – array of { upper_bound_cents, rate } (ascending, last bracket must be a catch-all with upper_bound_cents >= 10,000,000,000)
• se_tax_rate – self-employment tax rate
• se_deduction_factor – SE tax deduction factor
• corp_tax_rate – corporate tax rate
• fica_rate – FICA rate
• source – e.g., “IRS Publication 15-T”

The Tax Brackets page starts with a valid starter ladder instead of an invalid single row. Keep the bracket upper bounds ascending and leave the final row at or above $100,000,000.00 so the create request passes validation on the first try.

Check sales-tax rate freshness:

Use this to find stale jurisdiction rates or nexus states that are missing active rates for the signed-in tenant. The response is tenant-scoped; it does not summarize another tenant’s rate hygiene.

Update/deactivate bracket sets:

Tax Payments

Track tax payments made to federal and state authorities.

List tax payments:

Record tax payment:

Fields:

• quarter – YYYY-QN format (e.g., 2026-Q1)
• tax_year (required)
• amount_cents (required, > 0)
• payment_date (required)
• confirmation_number
• notes

Tax payment summary:

Returns totals by type, by quarter, and overall payment count.

Sales Tax Management

Open Sales tax from the tax/compliance lifecycle tabs or command palette (or navigate to the relevant workflow) to manage multi-jurisdiction sales tax.

Displayed tax amounts are computed from integer cents and exact decimal rates using Keystone’s sales-tax half-up minor-unit policy. Half-cent results round away from zero, so an equivalent credit/refund is the exact negative of the charge. If a nexus state has no effective reportable jurisdiction rate, invoice tax calculation stops and directs the operator to configure one; Keystone does not substitute a legacy flat rate.

The page has seven tabs:

Nexus Tracking

Track which states you have sales tax nexus in and monitor threshold progress.

• Add a state with + Add Nexus, selecting the state, setting the revenue/transaction thresholds, and registering if applicable.
• A progress bar shows how close YTD revenue is to the nexus threshold. Warning badges appear at 80% (“Approaching”) and 100% (“Breached”).
• Deactivate a nexus registration when you no longer have nexus in a state.
• Creating or changing a nexus registration records the signed-in operator, tenant, request context, and complete before/after state in the tamper-evident audit trail. Keystone commits the registration and audit evidence together. If audit persistence fails, the registration remains unchanged and the request reports a failure; correct the dependency and retry the same action.

Filing Rules

The Filing Rules tab shows the shared, sourced catalog Keystone uses for jurisdiction filing deadlines. Tax viewers can inspect the effective window, deadline formula, return form, authority link, and active status. Only principals explicitly granted keystone.platform.admin can create, edit, or deactivate these global rules; tenant owner/admin shortcuts do not grant that permission.

• Effective windows for the same country, state, and filing frequency cannot overlap.
• Use state, frequency, and freshness filters plus the server-driven page and page-size controls to review large effective-dated catalogs. Sort a desktop column with its header; the header announces ascending or descending order and the server retains filters, page size, and total count. Desktop rows and mobile cards expose the same authority, regime, return-form, verification, status, and permitted actions.
• Deactivation preserves prior remittance links and audit history. Add a newly effective rule instead of rewriting historical law.
• Creating, revising, or deactivating a filing rule commits the global catalog change and its platform-admin audit evidence together. An audit persistence failure leaves the catalog unchanged; correct the dependency and retry.
• Once a remittance references a rule, Keystone rejects changes to its jurisdiction, deadline, authority, or effective window. End-date the historical rule and create a successor so prior evidence remains truthful.
• Keystone automates only the combinations listed by the committed catalog support boundary. Catalog 2026.07.1 covers the standard monthly, quarterly, and annual state-level regimes for Texas and California. California quarterly-prepay and every unlisted jurisdiction/regime remain blocked.
• Nexus records select an authority-assigned filing frequency and regime; they do not carry raw due-date overrides.
• If a rule or holiday calendar is missing, stale, outside its coverage horizon, or lacks a required prepayment schedule, Keystone creates no projected deadline or remittance. The Compliance Calendar shows a blocked coverage card and the scheduler emits an operator notification linking back to Filing Rules.
• Repair by verifying the authority source, installing a current effective-dated rule/calendar through the governed catalog process, and rerunning remittance generation. The next idempotent run creates the obligation once without rewriting historical rows.
• Generated and automatically resolved remittances retain the selected filing-rule ID, so later reviews can reproduce which effective-dated authority rule produced the deadline.

Jurisdiction Rates

Configure tax rates for each jurisdiction level (state, county, city, district).

• Add rates with + Add Rate, selecting state, jurisdiction level, name, rate percentage, and effective date.
• Summary cards at the top show the combined rate per state (state + county + city + district).
• County, city, and district rates require at least one address matcher (postal code, postal prefix, county, or city). The table marks missing applicability and lets tax managers add, revise, or deactivate the matcher without changing the rate itself.
• Edit rates to update the percentage or set an end date. Deactivate rates that are no longer current.
• Active effective-date windows for the same state, jurisdiction level, and jurisdiction name cannot overlap. End-date or deactivate the superseded rate before adding its successor.

Exemption Certificates

Track customer tax exemption certificates.

• Add certificates with + Add Certificate, selecting the customer (searchable dropdown), state, exemption type, and dates.
• Certificates expiring within 30 days show an “Expiring Soon” badge; expired certificates are highlighted in red.
• Revoke a certificate when it is no longer valid (soft delete: sets status to revoked).

Remittance Tracking

Track sales tax remittance filings to state jurisdictions.

Select the legal entity and calendar tax year in the Sales Tax header. Keystone puts both selections in the URL before loading remittances or reports. If an explicit link contains an unavailable entity or invalid year, the workspace stops scoped loading and shows recovery; it never silently substitutes another entity. Changing either selection clears prior report results and closes an open remittance form.

• Automatic generation: Remittance obligations are auto-generated daily by the scheduler based on each nexus registration’s filing_frequency (monthly, quarterly, or annual). No manual creation needed for standard filing periods.
• Filing frequency and regime: Record the authority-assigned values on each nexus. Automation proceeds only when an effective, source-current catalog rule and complete holiday calendar match both values.
• Legacy recovery: A remittance marked legacy unverified blocks filing readiness. Replace it with the current catalog deadline or re-record it with complete authority evidence; Keystone never uses the legacy date for a filing decision.
• Update status to filed or paid to record the filing lifecycle. Paid requires a confirmation number and an amount that exactly equals tax due. Keystone auto-timestamps the transition and posts the balanced Sales Tax Payable-to-Cash journal once; an identical retry reuses it, and later edits to a paid remittance are blocked.
• Manual remittance creation and updates include tenant-scoped audit evidence for amount, confirmation, status, and automatic filing/payment timestamp changes. Keystone commits those values and their audit evidence together. If audit persistence fails, no remittance row, amount, status, or automatic timestamp from that request is retained; retry after the dependency recovers.
• Tax amounts (gross taxable, exempt sales, nontaxable sales, and tax collected) are computed automatically from issued invoice-line tax records for the filing period and jurisdiction. Drafts and voids are excluded; multi-jurisdiction rows count each source line’s sales basis once. Customer/certificate exemptions remain separate from zero-rate and product-nontaxable sales.
• Overdue filings (pending past due date) are highlighted in red with a warning icon.
• Deadline warnings are logged when remittances are due within 14 days.
• Records are sorted with overdue items first, then by due date ascending.

Product Rules

Configure which product categories are taxable in each state.

• Add rules with + Add Product Rule, selecting state and product category, setting taxable/exempt and optional reduced rate.
• Toggle between List view (filterable by state and category) and Matrix view (state x category grid showing taxable/exempt status at a glance).

Reports

Two report sub-tabs provide sales tax analytics:

Collected by Jurisdiction

• Shows tax collected grouped by state, jurisdiction level, and jurisdiction name.
• Date range filters (start/end) narrow the report to a specific period.
• Summary cards show total tax collected, total taxable amount, and jurisdiction count.
• Table includes per-jurisdiction tax collected, taxable amount, and transaction count, with a totals footer.

Nexus Exposure

• Shows nexus threshold status for all active states.
• Risk summary cards count states at each risk level: critical (>=100% of threshold or breached), high (>=75%), medium (>=50%), low (<50%).
• Table shows YTD revenue, transaction counts, percentage of threshold for revenue and transactions, and breach status.
• Color-coded risk badges and threshold percentages highlight states needing attention.

Quarterly Tax Estimates

Compute estimated taxes from GL data based on your entity type and tax brackets.

List estimates:

deterministic server page. The response reports the full matching total and identifies every estimate’s entity, functional currency, authority status, reason, and frozen profile evidence. Do not total the visible page.

Compute estimate:

Fields:

• tax_year (required)
• quarter (required, 1-4)

Requires a configured Company Profile for the selected active entity. The entity isolates the computation and all prior-period inputs. Omission is an invalid request, not a default or consolidated calculation; compute each entity separately to preserve one auditable estimate per entity, year, and quarter. Computes from GL data:

• Gross income for the quarter
• Deductible expenses
• Net taxable income
• Estimated SE tax, income tax, and total
• Per-state required payments only for explicit, attested jurisdiction inputs covered by a current sourced policy
• Persisted blockers and recovery actions when the policy or required apportionment/residency evidence is missing, stale, mismatched, or unsupported

Safe-harbor and payment-history calculations follow the same selected-company boundary. Keystone uses only that company’s prior-year estimated tax and its earlier quarterly payments. Activity recorded for another company in the tenant cannot lower or increase the selected company’s required payment. If the operator needs estimates for multiple companies, compute and review each company separately.

Entity-Aware Tax Summary

Tax Summary inherits the company most recently selected in Company Profile and other entity-aware workflows. If that company is still active, its income statement, quarterly estimates, and state-tax configuration load without reverting to the default company. Selecting another company in Tax Summary updates the shared company context for the next entity-aware workflow.

and officer salary, then classifies one operational functional-currency GL population. Available money is formatted in the entity currency. Legacy, missing, corrupt, or mismatched evidence is shown as Unavailable, with its reason and counts; it is never displayed as USD or zero. Supports: sole proprietorship, LLC (single/multi-member), S-corp, C-corp, partnership.

For multi-member LLCs and partnerships, includes per-member allocation based on active member count and ownership percentages.

Filing Readiness

Required query param:

The Tax Reporting page opens on a filing-readiness control plane for the selected filing year. The year in the page URL is the shared filing-year selection for Filing Readiness, Entity Summary, 1099 Preview, and Generate 1099s. Moving between those tabs does not silently substitute the prior calendar year.

Use it to answer:

• whether the year is actually ready to file
• which blockers or review items remain open
• what the next deadline is
• whether the annual package is blocked by open fiscal periods

The readiness checklist combines:

• company-profile presence
• tax-table freshness
• compliance-calendar and obligation coverage
• 1099 review state, including blocked vendors missing W-9 or marked explicitly ineligible
• annual-package controls
• sales-tax nexus registration, rate freshness, and the entity’s remittance backlog

The sales-tax checklist is a hard block when a nexus rate is stale or missing, an active nexus is not registered, or a remittance is overdue and still missing or open. Expand the item details to see the affected state, due date, and the corrective action. A remittance due today or already created for a future date is a review warning. Keystone does not warn merely because a later filing period has not been generated yet.

Next deadline combines income-tax obligations with sales-tax remittances. Overdue work is shown first; when nothing is overdue, the earliest due item is shown.

The annual-obligation population must be complete before the absence of a deadline can mean Clear. If annual obligations have not been generated, Next deadline shows Unavailable and Compliance calendar shows Not initialized with the missing count. A partially generated population shows Incomplete. Generate or repair the annual obligations, then refresh readiness; only a complete population with no open income-tax or sales-tax deadline shows Clear.

If readiness, entity summary, or 1099 preview cannot be loaded, the current tab shows the dependency error and a Retry action. The selected year remains unchanged. Responses from a previously selected year are discarded rather than replacing the current year after they arrive late.

The selected year follows the sales-tax filing period, not only the payment date. For example, a fourth-quarter remittance due in January remains visible under the year in which the fourth-quarter sales occurred.

From the same page you can jump into:

• 1099 Preview
• Generate 1099s
• Compliance Calendar if you have keystone.tax.view
• Annual Package if you have keystone.reports.view

Filing Completion Handoff

If you have keystone.accounting.manage, the filing readiness card also exposes a filing-completion handoff form.

Route:

Use it to record one of these handoff states on the annual filing obligation:

• completed when the filing is done and the result is final
• recovered when a previous failure has been cleared and the filing is ready to re-submit
• retry_scheduled when a submission failed and a retry window has been set
• blocked when filing is still blocked and you want the auditable result captured

The handoff stores:

• submission reference
• retry reason
• next retry time
• the auditable result snapshot on the annual filing obligation

This is a control record, not IRS e-file transport. The annual filing obligation is the source of truth for the recorded result.

Keystone commits the handoff and its audit evidence together. If audit persistence fails, the prior obligation state remains in force and the request reports a failure; correct the dependency and retry the same command. An identical retry returns the existing result without changing its recorded time or duplicating audit evidence. A completed handoff cannot be replaced with different evidence, and once transport evidence exists the completion handoff is immutable.

Direct Filing Transport

If you have keystone.accounting.manage, the filing readiness card exposes a direct filing transport form only after the filing-completion handoff is completed or recovered and the readiness checklist is clean.

Route:

When transport is locked, the card shows a truthful message instead of a submit path.

Use it to record one of these transport states on the annual filing obligation:

• submitted when the filing has been sent and is in flight
• recovered when a previous transport failure has been cleared and the filing is ready to resubmit
• retry_scheduled when transport failed and a retry window has been set
• blocked when transport is still blocked and you want the auditable result captured
• completed when the transport result is final and the submission is fully recorded

The transport stores:

• submission reference
• failure reason
• next retry time
• the auditable transport result snapshot on the annual filing obligation

Transport state is recorded on the same annual filing obligation as the completion handoff, and the annual filing obligation remains the source of truth for the recorded result.

Transport state and audit evidence commit together. A failed audit write leaves both the completion handoff and prior transport state unchanged. Identical retry is safe; a completed transport cannot be replaced with a conflicting result. This form records evidence observed by the operator—it does not itself transmit a filing to an external provider.

Transport uses the same single-record identity and pre-commit response snapshot as the completion handoff. Ambiguous legacy identity changes nothing, and a committed transport result is not followed by a refresh that could produce a misleading failure.

Preview and Generation

Preview vendors qualifying for 1099:

proven functional currency. It combines complete functional Expense evidence with same-currency Bill payment evidence for that entity only. Legacy, missing, or cross-currency source evidence blocks the result instead of producing a partial total. Tax IDs are masked. The threshold is $600 for tax years through 2025 and $2,000 for 2026 and later.

The preview now also surfaces vendor-readiness controls:

• w9_on_file
• is_1099_eligible
• blocked_reason
• blocked_detail

The Tax Reporting page renders those controls in the preview table so operators can see which vendors are blocked before attempting generation.

Generate 1099 data:

Parameters:

• force – override stale tax table gate (default: false)
• include_full_tin – show full TINs instead of masked (requires keystone.accounting.manage) checked for that entity; full TIN remains tenant-wide manage only)

Blocks if tax bracket tables are stale (unless forced). Returns vendor list with payment totals and TINs.

Generation now fails closed on vendor readiness:

• ready vendors are returned in vendors
• blocked vendors are returned separately in blocked_vendors
• blocked_count tells the operator how many cleanup items remain

Missing W-9 or explicit is_1099_eligible=false no longer passes through as silent metadata. The routed UI keeps preview and generate semantics separate and shows blocked vendors after generation instead of pretending the workflow completed cleanly.

Keystone commits the generation audit record before returning the generated dataset. If force=true, the freshness override and generation audit records commit together. Audit persistence failure returns an error and no successful generation is reported; resolve the audit dependency and retry. Reconciliation follows the same rule for its audit record.

Financial Obligations Calendar

Keystone tracks recurring financial obligations (tax filings, estimated payments, annual reports, etc.) to ensure nothing is missed.

Generate Obligations for a Year

Fields:

• tax_year (required)

Idempotent – generates standard obligations for the year (quarterly estimated taxes, annual filings, etc.). Does not duplicate if already generated.

List Obligations

Optional filter:

Current scope note:

Obligation Statuses

Status	Description
scheduled	Not yet started
in_progress	Work underway
blocked	Waiting on a dependency or exception review
ready_for_review	Ready for operator review
completed	Done
superseded	Replaced by a corrected state-tax estimate revision; terminal and read-only
overdue	Past due date

Update an Obligation

Update status, description, or link to close runs/estimates.

Annual Reporting Package

The annual package generates a CPA-ready bundle of financial reports for tax preparation.

Generate Package

Fields:

• tax_year (required)
• force – bypass stale tax table check (default: false)

Retrieve Package

Pass force=true to bypass tax table staleness check.

Package Contents

Section	Description
freshness_check	Tax bracket staleness status
year_end_trial_balance	Trial balance as of Dec 31
income_statement	Full P&L for the year
balance_sheet	Balance sheet as of Dec 31
deduction_schedule	Tax deductions by category
depreciation_schedule	Asset depreciation detail
tax_payment_ledger	All tax payments made during the year
vendor_1099_candidates	Vendors meeting the IRS 1099 reporting threshold
k1_summary	K-1 data for each LLC member
evidence_links	Links to supporting documents

Completion Evidence

Changing an accounting obligation to Completed requires an authority/source reference, evidence reference, completion note, consequence, and nonnegative amount. Keystone records the authenticated actor, selected company entity, and completion timestamp on the server. Mark complete opens the same evidence dialog from both Obligations and Compliance Calendar; there is no evidence-free quick completion path.

Tax Summary displays zero only for a complete, authoritative empty population. Missing company configuration, incomplete GL evidence, legacy estimates, and currency mismatch remain Unavailable with the backend reason and recovery action. A failed compute preserves the same-entity evidence and operator input; switching entity clears it, and late responses cannot repopulate the new scope.

Tax Summary also keeps the selected company in the URL. Moving to Filing Readiness through tax workflow navigation evaluates the same company and tax year instead of silently returning to the tenant default.

New tenant bootstrap installs sourced US federal single-filer bracket sets for 2025 and 2026. Keystone preserves an active tenant-managed table and replaces only an older projected or placeholder baseline. Tax calculations, close checks, 1099 generation, and annual packages always resolve reference data inside the signed-in tenant.

Filing Readiness evaluates annual financial obligations separately from the sales-tax filing calendar. An empty annual-obligation list no longer claims that a populated sales-tax calendar is empty. When a compute request is blocked by a missing or stale bracket set, Tax Summary links directly to Tax Brackets for recovery; company-profile errors continue to link to Company Profile. State estimated-tax obligations are created only after Keystone has resolved a supported policy and statutory payment date. Missing or unsupported policy data produces a blocked, actionable obligation instead of a scheduled item with an unknown deadline. After missing pass-through member residency is supplied, recomputation resolves the earlier blocker and carries its audit history into the member calculation.

Quarterly estimate computation returns federal estimate data together with serialized current state-estimate evidence. Unsupported jurisdiction coverage is a successful computation with a visible blocked state and recovery action; it is not an internal error and does not become a zero-dollar tax claim.