First: does sales tax apply to Bitcoin payments?
Yes. The payment method doesn’t change your tax obligations. If you’re required to collect sales tax on a transaction paid by cash or card, you’re required to collect it on the same transaction paid in Bitcoin. The IRS and state tax authorities treat crypto as property, not currency — but that’s about how you report what you receive. It has nothing to do with whether you charge your customer tax.
Your customer is buying a burger, a haircut, or a piece of furniture. The taxability of that transaction is determined by what they’re buying, not what they’re paying with.
The problem with Bitcoin POS and tax
With a traditional POS system, you ring up $10.00, the system adds 8% automatically, and the customer pays $10.80. The subtotal and tax are separated in your records from the moment the transaction happens.
With OrangeTill, you enter the total amount you want to receive — including tax. That’s by design: the QR code needs to encode one exact dollar amount for the crypto conversion. But it means the app needs to know your tax rate so it can back-calculate the subtotal for your records.
Without that separation, you’d be reporting your entire crypto revenue as income — including the portion that belongs to the state. That’s not accurate, and it’s not fair to you at tax time.
How OrangeTill handles it
Set your tax rate once in Settings and OrangeTill does the math automatically on every transaction.
The QR code still generates for the full $10.80 — your customer pays the right amount. But OrangeTill records $10.00 as your pre-tax income and $0.80 as tax collected, and separates them in your History log and CSV exports.
How to set it up
Open OrangeTill and go to Settings
Tap the Settings icon in the bottom navigation bar.
Find the "Sales / Meals Tax Rate" field
It’s in the Business section, just below your logo. Enter your rate as a number — for example, enter 8 for 8%. Leave it blank if tax doesn’t apply to your business.
Save Settings
Tap Save Settings. From this point on, every payment will automatically have the subtotal and tax calculated and stored.
Enter total-inclusive amounts at the register
As always, type the full amount your customer owes including tax. OrangeTill handles the separation behind the scenes.
What changes in your records
Once a tax rate is set, you’ll see the breakdown in three places:
- QR modal — when you generate the QR code, the screen will show the subtotal and tax breakdown below the total amount.
- History — each payment entry shows the subtotal and tax amount in gray text alongside the total.
- CSV export — two new columns: Subtotal USD and Tax Amount USD. Your accountant will thank you.
What about Koinly?
When you use the Koinly export, OrangeTill automatically uses the pre-tax subtotal as your income amount — not the total collected. This is correct: the tax portion isn’t your income, it’s money you collected on behalf of the state. Reporting the full total as income would overstate your taxable crypto earnings.
What about old payments?
Payments recorded before you set your tax rate won’t have subtotal or tax data. They’ll display normally in History without a breakdown. If you need to back-calculate tax on older payments, your accountant can do that from the total amounts in your CSV export using the same formula above.
Does this apply to Lightning payments?
Yes — the tax calculation works the same whether the customer pays on-chain or over the Lightning Network. The dollar amount you enter is what matters, and OrangeTill applies your tax rate to that amount.
A note for NH restaurant owners
New Hampshire’s Meals & Rooms Tax is currently 8%. It applies to prepared food sold for immediate consumption — which includes most restaurant, café, and food truck sales. It does not apply to grocery items or most retail goods.
If you’re unsure whether your specific products are taxable under NH law, check with the NH Department of Revenue Administration (revenue.nh.gov) or ask your accountant. The rules around prepared food vs. grocery items can be nuanced.
The crypto doesn’t change your tax obligation. It changes your payment method. Those are two completely different things.
Tax tracking, built in.
Set your rate once in Settings. OrangeTill handles the math on every transaction from there.
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