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

[Chris Travers <..hidden..>]

On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 12:14 PM, John Locke <..hidden..> wrote:

> In 1.3, there is a new "taxform" checkbox on invoice lines, but I have
> no idea what that's for -- is that to override the default behavior?

It's for use for things like 1099's on the AP side, and similar things
on the AR side.

Basically for cases where you have to do per-customer/vendor
reporting.  It does not affect tax calculations.


>If
> not, I think it would be useful to have something like this -- generally
> to exclude tax from an item that would normally include tax. In our
> case, for customers who purchase both wholesale and retail -- sales tax
> applies to wholesale but not retail. But then we get into the reporting
> issue, because revenue from these sales would need to get reported to
> the state in a different account. So better might just be to make
> wholesale a completely different part, associated with a different account.

Not a bad solution at present.  It also allows mixing wholesale and
retail parts on an invoice "I am buying five of these, three of which
are for resale."
>
> But there is one other case -- destination-based sales tax. Currently
> our e-commerce system correctly does an address lookup with the state to
> get the correct sales tax rate and location code we need to report for
> taxable sales. LSMB of course does not. And since Washington currently
> has something like ~2000 individual locations, with varying tax rates, I
> think the other scenario, until we can build the appropriate tax module,
> is to just allow a person to calculate the appropriate tax (or in our
> case, post it from the other system that already handles it correctly)
> and add it as a separate line item to the invoice so everything matches
> up. So I guess I'd like to see some sort of invoice-level setting for
> "apply tax automatically" vs. "add tax manually", and with the latter, a
> spot to put in the tax and enter an appropriate location code and rate
> that can be correlated in the future, in a spreadsheet download if
> nothing else.

SSTP is a mess.   It's also the reason why a twix bar is not in the
candy category but a snickers bar is.   I don't know of any solution
other than per-state tax modules to accommodate this.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers