Changelog

Version 10.3.5 — August 9, 2026

• Restored twelve older sales tax web addresses that had stopped working. Links saved or shared for the Georgia, Illinois, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington pages now send visitors to the national sales tax calculator instead of returning a not-found page.
• Removed a duplicated publication line from seven guides. Each of those pages showed the author byline with its own published and updated dates, and then repeated the same information immediately below. On five of them the repeated line had also fallen out of date and contradicted the byline above it. The byline dates were correct and are the ones that remain.
• Stopped two guides repeating the same worked example. The scope guardrail account of arrival times, expected finish times and volume allowances now appears only in Event Vendor Deposits, Final Payments, And Receipts, and the semi-monthly billing cycle only in How To Invoice Recurring Service Customers. What To Include On An Invoice and Invoice Payment Terms Examples keep the underlying advice, written for their own subject.
• Aligned the heading on the security records guide with its page title and its label in the guides index, which previously used three different names for the same article.
• Editorial pass on punctuation across four guides, principally The Clean Paperwork System. No advice, figure, source or tool behaviour was changed.

Version 10.3.4 — August 8, 2026

• Added a plain warning above every sales tax calculator stating that the preset figure is the state base rate only, and that county, city or district tax is usually charged on top. The calculators were always documented that way further down the page; the warning now sits where the rate is entered.
• Fixed an unreadable caption under the Florida state-rate table. The line carried a text colour built for the dark footer, leaving it at roughly 1.4:1 against the page background. It now meets the contrast standard. The line names the Florida Department of Revenue as the source of the figures in that table, so it needed to be readable.
• Gave the grey advisory note used on thirteen calculator and guide pages a visible box. It had no styling at all and read as ordinary body copy.
• Renamed two controls in the document generators. The trade-preset menu offered “Start blank”, which cleared nothing when selected, and now reads “Pick a trade (optional)”. The button that does clear the form was called “Reset form” and is now “Clear All Fields”. Each generator page also explains that the form opens with two example lines. Renaming a control that promised something it did not do; the underlying generator code was not changed.
• Applied the two renamed generator controls to the home page as well. The home page carries the same estimate generator, and it had been left with the old “Start blank” and “Reset form” labels.
• Stopped the estimate deposit helper from adding a second copy of the same sentence. Pressing “Insert Deposit Wording Into Payment Terms” more than once used to append the wording again each time. It now replaces the sentence it added before, so changing the deposit percentage updates the terms instead of stacking them.
• Renamed the read-only “Suggested Deposit Wording” box so it states plainly that the text is generated for you and is edited inside Payment Method & Terms after it is inserted.
• Corrected four cross-links on the California, Florida and New York sales tax pages. They described the Washington, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Ohio calculators as preloaded, but they open the national calculator, where the state has to be chosen from the list. The links now say so.
• Gave the note above each generator the same gold edge already used on the advisory notes elsewhere on the site, so it reads as guidance rather than as body copy.
• Version 10.3.3 was prepared on August 7, 2026 and superseded before publication. Everything listed in it is included here.

Version 10.3.2 — August 5, 2026

• Added the official address-level rate lookup tool published by each authority for Texas, California, New York, Illinois and Washington, so a combined rate can be confirmed for a specific job-site address rather than estimated.
• Added the Florida state rates that are not 6%: new mobile homes at 3%, amusement machine receipts at 4%, and electricity at 6.95%.
• Added the Illinois detail that 6.25% is the general merchandise rate, that qualifying drugs and medical appliances are taxed at 1%, and that Illinois rate changes generally take effect on 1 January or 1 July.
• Moved the Illinois source citation to the Department of Revenue’s sales and use tax page, which is more stable than the rate database index it replaced.
• Moved the next scheduled tax review forward to October 1, 2026, the next quarterly rate boundary for the states published here.
• All ten published state base rates were re-checked before this release. None changed.

Version 10.3.1 — prepared August 4, 2026, never published

This version was built and tested but never released to the public site. Everything listed below shipped inside version 10.3.2 instead, so version 10.3.1 was never live at any point.

• Fixed a large layout shift on the four generator pages: the page no longer jumps once the interactive tool finishes loading.
• Fixed the State Sales Tax Calculators card on the Calculators page, where the state links were breaking out of the card on some screens.
• Links inside body text are now underlined, so they no longer rely on colour alone to be recognisable.
• Darkened the gold used for text and the grey used for image captions to meet contrast guidelines.
• The Florida sales tax source now links to the Department of Revenue’s sales and use tax page instead of a direct PDF download.

Version 10.3.0 — August 3, 2026

• Added official source citations to every published sales tax rate: issuing authority, direct link to that authority’s own rate page, verification date, named reviewer, and next scheduled review.
• Rebuilt the Late Fee, Margin & Markup, Deposit / Balance, and Advance Deposit calculators with the formula in plain English, two worked examples each, edge cases, stated limitations, a comparison with the neighbouring calculators, and the test cases re-run after every change.
• Expanded the estimate, receipt, and cash receipt generator pages with a start-to-finish example, a comparison against word processor and spreadsheet templates, an explicit statement of what is never stored, and a list of what each tool does not do.
• Added first-hand operator experience to nine guides, plus three original diagrams covering the estimate-to-receipt sequence, deposit splits, and how late-payment interest accrues.
• Revised the author profile and the site-wide author card at the operator’s request, and added an explicit statement of the credentials held and not held.
• Corrected the Ohio and North Carolina combined-rate ranges on the national sales tax page, and fixed a link that pointed back to the page it was on.

Version 10.2.0 — July 19, 2026

• Added a trade preset engine to the document generators: 17 trade presets load typical line items, payment terms, and notes via a dropdown in the tool or a preset link from each trade template page.
• Rebuilt six trade template pages — roofing, painting, handyman, moving service, junk removal, and mobile detailing — with substantially expanded trade-specific guidance, and returned them to the index.
• Consolidated six lower-traffic state sales tax pages into an expanded national Sales Tax Calculator with a state base-rate preset selector and state-by-state guidance; old state URLs now redirect permanently.
• Added contextual internal links to under-linked guides and refreshed the sitemap.

Version 10.1.1 — July 19, 2026

• Updated the author portrait sitewide to a clearer, higher-resolution version of the original photograph.
• Extended the visible author card, portrait, and named author schema to all trade-template articles, including temporarily noindexed pages, plus the receipt and reminder template articles.
• Refreshed documented update dates on all articles carrying the new author card.

Version 10.1.0 — July 19, 2026

• Published a named operator profile plus editorial, corrections, testing, sources, accessibility, and changelog pages.
• Rewrote About and Contact with ownership, scope, testing, funding, and correction information.
• Added visible author attribution and documented dates to the 16 guides and eight retained trade-template pages.
• Simplified primary navigation and moved the full related-project disclosure to About.
• Removed inactive advertisement placeholders from the public page flow.
• Temporarily noindexed ten trade pages and six state pages pending deeper, individually useful rebuilds.

Version 10.0.4 — July 19, 2026

• Added a consistent, accessible deployment version marker and updated machine-readable version metadata.

Version 10.0.3 — July 2026

• Improved guide navigation and related-guide pathways across the publishing section.