I'm trying to reduce the complexity of the Stripe Dashboard for my connect accounts. For example, I want to force connected accounts to pay for Sales Tax and not be able to turn it off and I don't want each connected account to be able to do any branding but instead use my (parent) account.
How can this be achieved? Can this be done in the GUI, via some API calls that I can send once or would I need a full Stripe API integration for connected accounts (aka not use the Stripe Express dashboard)?
Yes this requires an API integration -- you likely want to use Destination Charges so that you have control over the integration from your platform account and you can just use the branding that you set there. You can still do this with Express accounts, but you would need to calculate the Sales Tax and then update your transfer amount based on the Connected Account covering this extra fee.