PayPal and Displaying Taxes

For PayPal Standard, you have the option in our gateway settings to show taxes separately on the PayPal payment page or include them in the itemized billing prices. This setting is called Include Taxes In Itemized Prices

Whilst this may not apply to everyone, if you are pricing your tickets with more than two decimals we generally recommend you NOT display prices on PayPal. The reason for this is because PayPal requires us to submit individual per-space prices of tickets which contain only two decimals. When you multiply that by the spaces booked, then the taxes apply, there's the possibility for errors in prices. Here's an example:

We have an event with a tax rate of 19% where the desired ticket price INCLUDING taxes is $49, which makes a tax-exclusive ticket price of $41.1764 rounded to four decimals.

If we were to use two decimals when calculating the price of one ticket, $41.18 plus 19% makes $49.0042 which will work for one ticket when rounding to two digits, but ten tickets will amount to $490.04 when rounded, that's four cents off.

Herein lies the problem with allowing PayPal to calculate your prices if you're using ticket prices containing more than 2 decimals. Should you want to let PayPal calculate the taxes, we can only supply to PayPal three bits of information,  the price of one space rounded to two decimals, spaces booked, and tax rate. With special prices like the example above, you will see slight discrepancies in total prices.

A lot of the time, the price will round correctly, but it's important to understand that some unique prices like the example above may not, and if you choose to show your taxes as a separate item in PayPal, be aware of what could happen. On the other hand, if prices are calculated by Events Manager, the four digits are used to calculate the price WITH tax and that is then passed onto PayPal for correct calculation according to spaces booked.