How can I enforce Sales Tax and parent branding for Stripe Express connected accounts?

Below is some clarification regarding these account configurations:

• Parent vs. Connected-Account Control
  Certain key settings (like default payment behavior, tax settings, and branding) are managed at the parent level in the Stripe Dashboard. In other words, for Express accounts these “parent configurations” (for example, enforcing Sales Tax or using your branding) aren’t something you can override or set through API calls on each connected account.

• How Express Accounts Work
  With Express, some configuration defaults (such as tax-related options and branding) are determined by settings in your parent (platform) Dashboard. You don’t have a per‐account API endpoint to override these. In effect, what you see on the Express Dashboard is pre‐configured and isn’t meant to be extensively customized from the connected account side.

• Customization Options
  If you want to force connected accounts to, say, always pay Sales Tax and use your branding without giving them the ability to change these settings themselves, then:

  • The defaults you want must be set up in the parent Dashboard.
  • You cannot rely solely on an API call or one-time configuration for Express accounts to enforce these limits.

• When to Consider a Full API Integration
  If the objective is to tightly control features—like disabling the ability for connected accounts to change tax settings or modify branding options—this level of control isn’t available with the Express dashboard’s pre-made UI. In that case, you’d need to move to a full Stripe API integration (for example, using Custom accounts) where you build and manage the connected account workflow. This approach gives you complete control over the user interface and which settings the connected accounts can or cannot change.

In summary, with Stripe Express the parent account’s dashboard settings dictate things like tax and branding defaults, and you cannot change these via API calls on a per-connected-account basis. For the level of enforcement you desire, a full custom (API-integrated) solution would be required rather than relying on the Express dashboard alone.