Tax Collected Over Time, Adobe Commerce

Metrics type: Supporting Metrics • Category: Ecommerce Platform

At a glance

Day-by-day tax collected over the last 90 days, plotted as a time series. Useful for Finance teams reconciling monthly VAT/sales-tax returns, spotting a tax-engine outage that suddenly switched to local fallback (lower rate), and validating that recently-changed tax rules are applying correctly.


What it counts	For each day in the 90-day window: `SUM(tax_amount)` over orders created in that day. Daily granularity; 7-day moving average overlay.
API field	`tax_amount`, `created_at` from the orders index. Adobe Commerce REST: `GET /rest/V1/orders`.
VAT / tax treatment	The card IS the time-series tax view. Tax engine source (native vs Avalara vs Vertex) toggleable per series.
Shipping	Default: total `tax_amount` includes both product and shipping tax. Toggle to product-only via `tax_amount - shipping_tax_amount`.
Discounts	Tax computed post-discount per Magento default (or per merchant config).
Cancelled orders	Excluded by default.
Refunds	Not subtracted, the card is creation-time. For net-of-refund tax, subtract Credit Memo tax from Refunds Over Time.
Currency	Mixed-currency display by default. `base_tax_amount` for FX-neutral / VAT-return-relevant.
Multi-store scope	All Store Views by default. Per-Store-View slicing essential for jurisdiction-specific reconciliation.
Time window	`90D` rolling. Quarterly windowing useful for tax filing.
Alert trigger	None on this card directly. Pair with Total Tax for aggregate alerts.
Roles	owner

Calculation

Calculated automatically from your Adobe Commerce data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.

Worked example

A B2B+DTC merchant on Adobe Commerce 2.4.7 with US (Avalara) + UK (native) Store Views. Snapshot 13 May 26, 90-day rolling. Aggregate stats:

Metric	UK	US	Combined
Days	90	90	90
`SUM(tax_amount)`	£405,200	$271,500	mixed
Mean per day (£/$ home currency)	£4,500 / $3,017
Standard deviation	£1,640	$720
Min day (Sun, low traffic)	£620	$410
Max day (Mon post-Easter spike)	£8,940	$5,800

Notable events on the chart:

Date	Event	Tax impact
12 Mar 26	UK Reduced VAT rate added (5% on children’s clothing range)	UK Reduced series jumps from £0 to ~£280/day; UK Standard series drops slightly as products reclassified
14 Apr 26	Post-Easter Monday surge	Combined tax peaks at ~£12,000/day
22 Apr 26 12:00 GMT	Avalara API outage (90 minutes)	US tax briefly drops to ~50% of normal; orders captured locally with native Magento fallback rates
28 Apr 26 onwards	Sustained dip during supplier-sizing PR crisis	Combined tax drops with revenue ~15%

Insight pattern:

The 12 Mar reclassification of children’s clothing is visible as a step change. Products previously taxed at 20% are now at 5%; combined tax-per-revenue ratio dropped from ~17.5% to ~16.8%. Confirms the rule was activated correctly.
The 22 Apr Avalara outage is a critical learning. During the 90-min outage, orders went through Magento’s local fallback rates which were last-synced from Avalara on 1 Apr. Some county rates had changed since; the fallback under-collected by ~$420 across 18 affected orders. Finance had to issue catch-up invoices. Action: sync Magento fallback rates from Avalara monthly (currently set to “On API call” only).
Day-of-week pattern. Sundays show the lowest tax (because lowest order volume). UK Reduced VAT (children’s clothing) shows a different DOW pattern, more weekend-heavy because it’s DTC parent-buyer traffic.
Cross-link with Tax Analysis: the per-rate breakdown for the 14 Apr peak day showed UK Standard at £6,800 + UK Reduced at £490 + UK Zero at £0 + US (across all states) at $5,800. Sum to combined £6,800 + £490 + ($ 5,800 ~= £4,640 at then-FX) ≈ £11,930.
Quarterly view for VAT filing. Toggle the chart to 91-day cumulative; UK Standard 20% column should match exactly the figure submitted on the next VAT return (after subtracting refunded VAT from Credit Memos).
Net-of-refund version. Subtract the daily Credit Memo tax_amount from this card to get net-tax-per-day, the actual figure that would land on the VAT return. The card’s “net” toggle does this automatically when Refunds Over Time is on the same dashboard.

Sibling cards merchants should reference together

Card	Why pair it with Tax Collected Over Time
Total Tax	Aggregate.
Tax Analysis	Per-jurisdiction breakdown for any given day.
Total Revenue	Denominator-of-context; verify rate consistency over time.
Refunds Over Time	Refunded tax to subtract for net VAT.
Revenue Over Time	Revenue and tax should track proportionally; divergence flags rate misapplications.
`avalara.tax_liability_over_time`	Avalara’s daily series; should match this card’s US-side.
`shopify.tax_over_time`	Cross-platform reference.

Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in Adobe Commerce Admin:

Reports > Sales > Tax with “Show By” set to “Day” and date range matching the card. Daily column should match this card’s daily values.

For Avalara users:

Avalara Admin Portal > Reports > Liability Worksheet, set the period and Avalara renders the same day-by-day shape.

Why our number may legitimately differ from Adobe Commerce Admin:

Reason	Direction of divergence
Currency. Reports default to base; this card defaults to mixed display.	Material for multi-currency stores
Reports indexer lag. Daily aggregations refresh nightly; today’s value lags by up to 24h in Reports. This card refreshes every 5-15 min.	Vortex IQ ahead on trailing day
Avalara commit failures. Failed commits leave Adobe with locally-computed tax; Avalara never sees the order. Daily totals diverge by the failed-commit value.	Sum of failures
Time-zone. UTC vs Store View locale; bucket shifts at day boundary.	±1 day at edges
Cancelled inclusion. Card excludes cancelled.	Standard

Cross-connector reconciliation (when these connectors are connected for this merchant):

Card	Expected relationship	What divergence tells you
`avalara.tax_liability_over_time`	Daily Avalara liability ≈ this card’s US-side daily	Daily gaps point to commit failures on specific days; investigate.
`vertex.tax_over_time`	Same logic for Vertex users	Same diagnostic.

Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Why does my chart show a sharp drop on a specific day, but revenue looks normal? Tax-engine outage is the most common cause. Avalara API blips, certificate expiries, and rate-table sync issues can cause Magento to fall back to local rates which may be lower or zero. Cross-check the day with the AvaTax log: System > Configuration > Sales > Tax > AvaTax > Logging. Why does today’s value look low? Either today is incomplete (in-progress) or there’s a tax-engine issue. Compare to same-DOW prior weeks; if today’s per-revenue ratio is materially below historical, investigate. My Reports > Sales > Tax shows a different daily total than this card. Currency is the usual culprit (Reports uses base; card uses mixed). Indexer lag is the next (today’s day in Reports may be 24h stale). Reconcile via base-currency mode and previous-day data points. Can I see this for a custom tax filing window? Yes. The card supports custom date ranges. Most merchants build a “Tax Filing” dashboard with this card set to the quarterly window, plus the per-jurisdiction breakdown from Tax Analysis. Why does the chart show a sudden mid-period change in the rate? Most often a config change. Stores > Configuration > Sales > Tax rules and rates can change at any time; the change applies prospectively. If the merchant added a new rule, increased a rate, or reclassified products mid-period, the chart shape will shift on that date. Refunded VAT isn’t subtracted, why? Because the card answers “what tax was collected at sale”. Refund-tax reversal is a separate concept. For “what tax we owe net” use the dashboard’s Net Tax view which combines this card with Refunds Over Time. My multi-store has one Avalara and one native engine. The chart is mixed; can I separate? Yes via the engine-source toggle. Each tax-engine source becomes its own line series. A sustained period of zero tax appears, what happened? Two possibilities: (1) the merchant temporarily disabled tax (common during a storefront migration); (2) the customer base shifted to all tax-exempt (e.g. all B2B traffic for that period). Cross-check Stores > Configuration > Sales > Tax for any “Disabled” toggles, and the Tax Analysis per-jurisdiction view for that period. Day-of-week pattern is more pronounced than for revenue, why? Because tax % varies by jurisdiction-mix. Weekend orders skew DTC-residential (with full tax); weekday orders include more B2B (often tax-exempt). The DOW pattern of tax is steeper than DOW pattern of revenue. Does Avalara handle product-tax-class changes retroactively? No. Avalara taxes the order at the time of capture using the product’s then-classification. If you reclassify a product later, historical orders keep their original rate; only new orders get the new rate. The chart preserves history accurately.

Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Tax Collected Over Time is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Adobe Commerce and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.

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Tax Collected Over Time, Adobe Commerce

At a glance

Calculation

Worked example

Sibling cards merchants should reference together

Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

​At a glance

​Calculation

​Worked example

​Sibling cards merchants should reference together

​Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

​Known limitations / merchant FAQs

​Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

At a glance

Calculation

Worked example

Sibling cards merchants should reference together

Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre