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Card class: Non-Hero • Category: Ecommerce Platform

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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 countsFor each day in the 90-day window: SUM(tax_amount) over orders created in that day. Daily granularity; 7-day moving average overlay.
API fieldtax_amount, created_at from the orders index. Adobe Commerce REST: GET /rest/V1/orders.
VAT / tax treatmentThe card IS the time-series tax view. Tax engine source (native vs Avalara vs Vertex) toggleable per series.
ShippingDefault: total tax_amount includes both product and shipping tax. Toggle to product-only via tax_amount - shipping_tax_amount.
DiscountsTax computed post-discount per Magento default (or per merchant config).
Cancelled ordersExcluded by default.
RefundsNot subtracted, the card is creation-time. For net-of-refund tax, subtract Credit Memo tax from Refunds Over Time.
CurrencyMixed-currency display by default. base_tax_amount for FX-neutral / VAT-return-relevant.
Multi-store scopeAll Store Views by default. Per-Store-View slicing essential for jurisdiction-specific reconciliation.
Time window90D rolling. Quarterly windowing useful for tax filing.
Alert triggerNone on this card directly. Pair with Total Tax for aggregate alerts.
Rolesowner

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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.

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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:
MetricUKUSCombined
Days909090
SUM(tax_amount)£405,200$271,500mixed
Mean per day (£/$ 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:
DateEventTax impact
12 Mar 26UK 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 26Post-Easter Monday surgeCombined tax peaks at ~£12,000/day
22 Apr 26 12:00 GMTAvalara API outage (90 minutes)US tax briefly drops to ~50% of normal; orders captured locally with native Magento fallback rates
28 Apr 26 onwardsSustained dip during supplier-sizing PR crisisCombined tax drops with revenue ~15%
Insight pattern:
  1. 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.
  2. 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).
  3. 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.
  4. 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.Sumtocombined£6,800+£490+(5,800. Sum to combined £6,800 + £490 + (5,800 ~= £4,640 at then-FX) ≈ £11,930.
  5. 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).
  6. 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.

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Sibling cards merchants should reference together

CardWhy pair it with Tax Collected Over Time
Total TaxAggregate.
Tax AnalysisPer-jurisdiction breakdown for any given day.
Total RevenueDenominator-of-context; verify rate consistency over time.
Refunds Over TimeRefunded tax to subtract for net VAT.
Revenue Over TimeRevenue and tax should track proportionally; divergence flags rate misapplications.
avalara.tax_liability_over_timeAvalara’s daily series; should match this card’s US-side.
shopify.tax_over_timeCross-platform reference.

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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:
ReasonDirection 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):
CardExpected relationshipWhat divergence tells you
avalara.tax_liability_over_timeDaily Avalara liability ≈ this card’s US-side dailyDaily gaps point to commit failures on specific days; investigate.
vertex.tax_over_timeSame logic for Vertex usersSame diagnostic.

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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.

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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.