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

[John Locke <..hidden..>]

On 06/20/2011 03:54 PM, Chris Travers wrote:
>
> 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.

In our case, we don't have so many customers that it's a big burden to
just add a new tax for the location of a customer who has a taxable
transaction. So that's what I've been doing -- creating a new tax
whenever we have a customer with a taxable transaction in a new location.

The problem you highlight above is more about marking products as
taxable or not -- that much, while muddy, is at least easily implemented
today.

The bigger problem is having tax rates that vary based on the customer's
address, and a requirement to report a location code for each taxable
transaction.

At the moment, our customers actually pay via another system
(Drupal/Ubercart) which already does the right thing for taxes -- it
does a call to a web service run by the State of Washington which
returns the appropriate location code and rate.

Basically what I need from LedgerSMB is a blank line item I can populate
with this data, that is clearly a "tax" line, exported for reporting. If
I can export the tax report detail to ODS, I can then slice it up per
location code to file the taxes.

With that generic infrastructure in place, actually writing a module to
populate that tax line as appropriate would be the next step...

Is there a way to programmatically create an invoice today with a custom
tax line?

Cheers,
John Locke
http://freelock.com