Re: Tax account creation: how to 'detect' tax accounts?

[Chris Travers <..hidden..>]

On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 2:47 PM, o1bigtenor <..hidden..> wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 2:56 PM, Luke <..hidden..> wrote:
>> On Sun, 19 Jun 2011, Erik Huelsmann wrote:
>>
>>> the check marks in the screen say "Include in selection list"; a user
>>> might deselect the check marks, resulting in the above logic to
>>> conclude that the account is no longer a tax account. The conclusion
>>> is incorrect of course.
>>
>> For sanity's sake, those checkmarks should revert to unchecked, and the
>> properties not be saved, if the tax checkbox is not selected.
>>
>> If it's not selected as a tax account, it shouldn't be permitted to appear
>> in tax dropdowns.
>> That will prevent accidentally selecting it for dropdowns, but forgetting
>> to mark it as a tax account.
>>
>>> On gTalk, we agreed the best course of action is to add a
>>> characteristic to the account's 'account' record to say it's a tax
>>> account. When that check mark is selected, there should also be a row
>>> in the 'tax' table which describes the calculation rules to be
>>> applied. We should probably deny changing the 'tax' check mark after
>>> the account has been posted to though [if we really want that, I
>>> should look into triggers in the database to achieve that goal; no
>>> idea off hand how to arrange that denial].
>>
>> Why?
>>
>> I mean, I know it would be kind of nonsensical to uncheck that box after
>> the fact, but if for some reason someone really wanted to, maybe they
>> should be able to.
>>
>> So I'll ask the question: is there any conceivable reason why someone
>> might want to uncheck a tax account?
>
> Export sales. Years ago I looked at buying something while I was in
> Europe. Local purchasers paid 18% tax but because I was shipping the
> item directly out of country the tax was 0%.

Different problem, one we need to address separately.

Unless I am completely lost here in this discussion, I think Erik is
saying that tax accounts should be marked as such on he Create/Edit
Account screen.  We are talking here about account-level settings.

What I hear you talking about is the occasional need to uncheck or
check tax settings on an invoice level.  There are a few use cases
where this is required and I think we need to look at allowing this at
some point.  For example, in addition to export sales, consider sales
tax in most US states is not chargeable for goods purchased for
retail.  You give a declaration to the business and they don't charge
you sales tax on transactions you identify as goods for resale.  They
are still required to charge taxes on goods that you don't declare as
such.  Like export purchase, this is a transaction-level issue not  an
issue of whether an account is a tax account or not.

Thinking about this some more, wondering if we should create a branch
of the Simple module which would detect the shipto country, compare
against the Default Country setting, and only charge taxes on things
delivered to the default country.  That might be less error prone than
manually checking/unchecking boxes on the invoice screen though it
wouldn't avoid the goods for resale issue above since that's a matter
of customer declaration at time of purchase.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers