Ok, I have found the root of the problem.

In Settings, Products, I have the Product Tax option (enable or disable) set to disabled. This is because I don’t need or want to set taxes at the product level for Sales. I use Order Tax for that, as previously explained. I absolutely don’t want the option during either product or sales entry of setting tax on individual products. For our other business, which is not going to move to SMA until end of year, it might be appropriate. For this business, however, it is not.

I did not expect Products tax settings to overflow into Purchases behavior. I expected, since none of my products are assigned taxes (ie, the field in the database is null as a result of the Product Tax option being disabled), that purchases would have no tax. Instead, it seems the Settings, Sales, Order Tax rate is used. Or, maybe that’s just the luck of what happens if the product item tax is null.

Anyway, if I set Product Tax enabled, only then during Purchases do I see the Order Tax option when entering a purchase. So long as I have all products set to a No Tax option, then I can bypass tax calculations on purchases. However, if I change this setting, it creates other effects I do not want (as noted above.)

I’ll guess I’ll have to find a way to work around it for now. Long term - and as a feature request - I think the best solution would be to have a Settings, Purchases, Purchase Tax option that would do for purchases what Settings, Sales, Order Tax does for sales.

By the way, you keep referencing the demo system, and I know you tell people to test the demo system before buying. If you are going to do that, then I suggest you need to expose the Settings panel so people can test all of the options. Otherwise, how would anyone know if some thing is or is not possible based on a settings change?

We can leave this for now, as resolving it will require a code change by one of us. With luck there will be the suggest Purchases, Purchase Tax option in a next version.

Thanks