If your business is registered for GST, the tax liability is yours. The software only decides whether meeting it is a screen or an evening with a calculator. That makes tax an unusually good subject to interrogate a supplier about, because the answers are specific and easy to check.
Seven questions, in the order we would ask them.
1. Show me a printed tax invoice
Not a receipt. An actual tax invoice, printed from the system, with the words on it. A tax invoice generally has to identify itself as one, carry your registration number and the buyer's details, number itself uniquely, and separate the taxable value from the rate and the tax charged. If a supplier reaches for a slide instead of a printout, you have learned something.
2. Can a price be tax inclusive?
Most retail here prices tax inclusive: the shelf says 245 rufiyaa and the customer pays 245 rufiyaa. Wholesale often quotes a value and adds tax at the bottom. A serious system supports both, per product, and still separates the tax correctly on the document and in the reports.
Software that can only add tax on top will quietly force you to reprice a whole shop, or to do arithmetic at the counter.
3. What happens when a rate changes?
Rates are not permanent and a change is a busy week for every registered business. Ask how the change is applied, whether historic documents keep the rate they were issued under, and whether you have to touch every product by hand. That last one is the difference between an afternoon and a fortnight.
4. Where does the invoice number come from?
It should come from a locked sequence held by the system, not from a person typing. Two staff serving at once is the ordinary way duplicates happen, and duplicate invoice numbers are a real problem in an audit rather than an inconvenience.
5. Can it produce the period, not just the documents?
Filing is assembly. What you want is a single screen for the period showing taxable sales, anything zero rated or exempt, the tax you charged, then the purchases and the tax you paid. If the system can only give you a list of sales, somebody is still doing the assembly, and that somebody is being paid by you.
Ask to see the report for a full month, on a real dataset, and ask whether it can be exported before it reaches your accountant.
6. What does it do about returns and corrections?
Goods come back and invoices are issued wrong. Ask how a return is recorded, what document the customer receives, and how the correction reaches the tax period. A system that lets somebody quietly edit a posted sale is convenient right up until the month you have to explain it.
7. What is the buyer's record?
Business customers need their own details on the invoice to claim anything against it. If the system cannot attach a customer with a registration number to a sale, every guest house you supply will come back asking for a reissue, and you will do the work twice.
The honest footnote
Rates, thresholds and filing periods sit with MIRA and they change. Any supplier who quotes them to you as fixed facts, us included, should be checked against mira.gov.mv or your accountant. What you are rating here is not whether a salesperson knows the tax code. It is whether the software can be told the truth once and then keep telling it on every document.
The same subject from the other side of the counter, written for the person using the till rather than choosing it, is on the product's own blog: what a tax invoice must show in the Maldives.
The tax invoice that RekordPOS prints is one of the screens we are happiest to show before anybody pays for anything. If you want to see it against your own products, ask us for a look.