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Capture

Calculating tax and reporting the sale are two different things. Tax is calculated when the shopper checks out. Reporting — TaxCloud calls it capture — is when the completed order is recorded in your TaxCloud account as a transaction that can be filed.

The setting

Stores → Configuration → Sales → Tax → TaxCloud Settings → Capture in TaxCloud

Option The order is reported Suits
On order creation As soon as the order is placed Most stores; the default
On payment When an invoice is paid Stores with cancellations, fraud, or offline payment
On shipment When a shipment is created Stores that only want to report goods that shipped

This is about when, never about how much. The whole order is reported whichever you choose — there is no partial capture.

Choosing

On order creation is simplest. The sale is in TaxCloud immediately, and cancelled orders are reversed when they are cancelled. The downside is churn: orders that were never paid for still arrive, then get reversed.

On payment avoids that. Nothing reaches TaxCloud until money does. If you take payment by check, bank transfer or purchase order — or if you get a meaningful number of cancellations — this is usually the better choice.

On shipment is the most conservative: report only what actually went out. Consider it if you take orders long before you fulfil them, or backorder frequently.

With online payment, creation and payment are nearly the same moment

Card payments are typically authorised and invoiced within seconds of the order. The difference between the first two options matters most for offline and deferred payment methods.

Changing it later

Safe to change at any time. It affects orders from that point on; orders already reported stay reported.

Changing from On order creation to On payment will not retrospectively un-report anything.

What is recorded

When an order is captured, the extension notes that on the order itself. That local record is what lets a later cancellation know whether there is anything to reverse, without asking TaxCloud again.

The order is reported against the address it was taxed against: its shipping address, or its billing address for a download-only order that ships nothing (see At checkout). The address used is written to the log alongside the capture, so you can confirm both when an order was reported and where it was reported to.

When capture does not happen

Calculations-only mode. If Only do tax calculations without further TaxCloud integration is on, nothing is ever reported and the Capture setting disappears — there is nothing left for it to schedule. Use it only when another system is reporting the same sales to TaxCloud.

The order never reached the trigger. An order set to capture on payment that is cancelled before invoicing is never reported. That is the point of the setting.

The call failed. A TaxCloud outage at the moment of capture is written to the log. The sale is in Magento but not in TaxCloud, so it will not be in a filing — worth checking the log periodically if you have had connectivity trouble.

An order that is never captured is never filed

TaxCloud files from the transactions it holds. You collected the tax from the customer either way, so an order missing from TaxCloud is tax you are holding with no return recording it.

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