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

On Sun, 19 Jun 2011, Chris Travers wrote:


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:


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.
[As a side note, I'm convinsed by Erik's arguement about stuff entering undefined/broken states if someone unchecked that flag, so I have no continuing objection to the proposal.] 


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.


*and* that they can not subsequently be unmarked.
I questioned that part.
Thinking about it further, there should probably be some things that appear on the new account screen, that do not even show up on account editing screens. (Although, that screws with "save as new" functionality) 
Tax selector, account type (Inc/Exp/Cash/...).


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
Yes. I have a new client which I am setting up in LSMB, who is going to have this problem, a lot. I had thought that was something we were looking to have in 1.3, back when it was discussed 18 months or so ago. 


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.
A good idea, but how would that work in places like the EU? A bunch of countries functioning in a block? I don't know anything about their tax codes, but I thought that some taxes applied across national borders there, although not outside the Union of course. 

Luke