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Some of the stuff you buy doesn’t get taxed — and Garde needs to know which items those are. When products are correctly marked as tax-exempt, invoice taxes only get applied where they should, and your category expenses stay accurate.
Common tax-exempt scenarios in restaurants:
  • Produce and groceries — exempt in many states when purchased for resale or preparation
  • Catering orders — some jurisdictions exempt catering supplies or large-format food purchases
  • Alcohol for resale — depending on your state, wholesale liquor and wine purchases may be exempt
  • Non-food supplies — items like cleaning chemicals or paper goods may have different tax rules
Tax laws vary by state and municipality, so check with your accountant if you’re unsure which items qualify.
When you set a category to tax-exempt, it only applies to new products created after you save the change. Existing products in that category won’t flip automatically — you’ll need to update those at the product level (individually or in bulk, both covered below).
To adjust how miscellaneous fees and taxes get applied, see Handling Taxes, Delivery and other Miscellaneous Charges. And remember — taxes don’t affect the product price, just the total category expense.

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Video: Changing Products and Categories

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1. Find the product you want and open, click “Edit Product”

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Changing Products Individually

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1. Find the product and click “Edit Product”

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2. Check the box “Product should be tax exempt”

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3. Click Save

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Changing Products in Bulk

Need to update a bunch of products at once? Head to the Products page and select the ones you want to change. In this example, we’ll set all Wine products to tax-exempt.

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1. Go to Products > View All Products, then filter by “Category Type” and select “Wine”

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2. Use the checkbox at the top-left to select all products at once

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3. Click “Update Products” and choose “Update Tax Exempt Status”

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4. Set the selected products to “Tax Exempt” and click “Update Products”

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Changing a Category’s Default

Want every new product in a category to start as tax-exempt? You can set that at the category level.

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1. Go to Accounting > Categories

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2. Click the “Category Type” column header to sort and find what you need

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3. Find the category, then double-click in the “Default to tax exempt” column to change it to “Yes”

In this example, we’re updating the Liquor category.

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4. Click “Save Changes”

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Sales Tax on Consumables

So you’ve done your homework and marked the right products and categories as tax-exempt. Nice work. But what happens when you upload an invoice where every product is tax-exempt, yet the invoice still has taxes on it? This comes up more than you’d think. Say your sous chef runs to the grocery store for last-minute produce. The store charges sales tax, but all those products are tax-exempt in Garde. Here’s the thing: we can’t leave those taxes sitting in the Miscellaneous Fees boxes because there are no taxable products to attach them to. Instead, the taxes get added as a line item on the invoice itself. Garde creates both a product and a category called “Sales Tax on Consumables” (also set to tax-exempt) to capture these charges. You can map this category to whatever account makes sense in your accounting system — handy if you want to track these extra taxes over the course of the year. Instead of seeing taxes within the category like this: You’ll see the new product and category created because all products are tax-exempt: