Tax Rates, Terms, and Billing Options
If you work in a jurisdiction that charges sales tax — GST, PST, VAT, or any other regional variation — Contract Management Settings lets you set up tax rates and payment terms that flow into new projects and proposals automatically.
Setting Up Tax Rates
Under Contract Management Settings, you can create as many tax rates as you need. If you work across multiple jurisdictions with different tax rates — different provinces, states, or countries — set up a separate tax rate for each one.
Tax rates are then selected under the Billing tab, where you configure the defaults that flow into new projects and proposals. When setting up a proposal or project, you'll select which tax rate(s) apply, then use radio toggles to indicate which items — labor, expenses, consultant pass-throughs — are actually subject to that tax.
Setting Up Payment Terms
Payment terms, configured on the Terms tab (just before Billing), define when you expect to be paid on invoices. Beyond standard options like Net 15, Net 30, or Due on Receipt, you can set up more specific terms:
- Due on a specific day of the month — for example, setting every invoice to be due on the 20th, regardless of when it was issued that month.
- Conditional terms — for example, a "Pay When Paid" condition, commonly used when working as a subconsultant for an architect whose contract states they'll pay you once they've been paid by their own client.
As with other setup items in BaseBuilders, you can delete terms and tax rates you no longer use, or archive them to retain them for future reporting purposes without offering them for new use.
How These Settings Flow Into Projects and Proposals
Tax rates and terms set up here are selected together under Billing Options, and both copy into new proposals and projects when they're created.
The key word is copy — once copied in, these settings become fully editable on the individual project or proposal. That means changing a tax rate or term here in settings will not automatically update projects or proposals that already exist. If you need to push a settings change out to existing records, that's done through Maintenance, where you can apply updated settings to a group of projects or to all projects at once — but this never happens automatically.
Where Billing Options Appear on a Project
On an individual project, select Edit, then look under Billing Options. Here you'll find:
- Billable Expense Markup
- Consultant Pass-Through Markup
- Terms
- Taxes
These fields are populated from your settings defaults when the project or proposal is first created, but from that point forward they're fully editable — giving each project or proposal its own independent billing setup, even as your firm-wide defaults continue to evolve.
Best Practice
Set up a tax rate for every jurisdiction you actually do work in, and use conditional terms like Pay When Paid where your subconsultant contracts call for it, rather than approximating with a standard Net term. Since changes to settings don't cascade automatically, review your Maintenance options periodically if your tax rates or terms change, so existing projects and proposals stay aligned with current requirements where appropriate.
Summary
Tax Rates and Terms are configured under Contract Management Settings and selected together under Billing Options, which copy into new projects and proposals as defaults. Tax rates can be jurisdiction-specific, and terms support standard options (Net 15, Net 30, Due on Receipt) as well as day-of-month due dates and conditional terms like Pay When Paid. Once copied into a project or proposal, these settings are independently editable and won't update automatically if the source settings change — use Maintenance to push updates to existing records when needed.