Resale Certificates

When you sell to another jeweler or dealer who will resell what they buy, you don’t collect sales tax — but only if they present a valid resale certificate issued by their state’s tax authority. If you skip the tax for someone who turns out NOT to have a valid permit, the state can come back during an audit and bill you for the uncollected tax plus penalties. Recording + verifying the cert is what protects you.

Where it lives

Open any contact tagged as a customer and look for the Resale Certificate card between the Primary Address and Customer Details sections. The card only appears on customer-role contacts (not on vendor-only or partner-only records).

What to record

• Permit / Cert # — the number on the customer’s resale or exemption certificate (e.g. SR-CDD-44-118819 for CA, 1-23-4567890-1 for TX). Format varies by state — copy whatever the customer hands you, JewelTrak doesn’t enforce a pattern.
• Issuing State — pick the state that issued the permit (usually the customer’s home state, but not always). Drives the verification link below.
• Expires On — most states don’t issue an expiry; leave blank if there isn’t one. If there is, JewelTrak will surface it on the contact record so you can chase a renewal before it lapses.

Verifying with the state’s portal

After picking a state, the card surfaces a Verify with {Authority} ↗ link. Tapping it opens that state’s official permit-lookup portal in a new tab (CDTFA for California, Comptroller for Texas, DOR for most others). Enter the customer’s permit number there, confirm the business name + status match what you have on file, then come back to JewelTrak.

For the 5 states with no general sales tax — Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon — the card shows a “doesn’t collect sales tax — no resale cert needed” notice instead of a link. You can still sell tax-exempt to those customers without a cert.

Marking verified

Once you’ve eyeballed the state portal and the cert checks out, tick the I’ve verified this permit with the state portal checkbox at the bottom of the card and save. JewelTrak stamps:

• The exact time you verified (server-side, so it’s authoritative)
• Which JewelTrak user ticked the box (read from the auth context)

That stamp shows up as “Verified by Sarah on May 14, 2026” beside the checkbox the next time anyone opens this contact — and a green Verified pill appears in the card header so it’s obvious at a glance.

Re-verifying

If the customer’s circumstances change (new permit number, lapsed registration, etc.) — uncheck the box, save (clears the timestamp + user), then enter the new info and re-tick the box. The next verification gets a new stamp.

Why this beats paid services

The big alternative is Avalara CertCapture or similar — they automate verification across all states + store the cert PDFs + send expiry reminders. That’s worth it if you do high-volume wholesale across many states, but it runs ~$1000+/month and 2-3 days of integration work. The free state-portal-link approach in JewelTrak gets you ~80% of the protection for $0.

What this doesn’t do (yet)

• Doesn’t auto-validate the cert against the state’s API — there’s no consolidated US-wide API, so this is operator-driven verification. The state portal does the actual validation; JewelTrak records that you did it.
• Doesn’t store the cert PDF — if the customer hands you a paper or PDF cert, file it in your records separately. Cert-PDF storage on contacts is a possible future addition.
• Doesn’t auto-skip tax on invoices — that’s still controlled by the customer’s Customer Type (Trade / Wholesale / Retail) on the Customer Details card. The resale cert is the paperwork that justifies skipping tax for Trade / Wholesale buyers.
• Doesn’t track multi-state certs — v1 assumes one cert per customer. If your wholesale buyers operate in multiple states with separate permits, file the additional certs as notes for now; multi-state support can land later.

Audit trail

Every change to the resale-cert fields goes through the existing contact audit log (visible at /audit-log for org admins). The before / after snapshots include ResaleCertNumber, ResaleCertState, ResaleCertVerifiedAt, and ResaleCertVerifiedBy — so you have a defensible paper trail for any state auditor asking “when did you check this?“.