Re: Tax and locations

["David Van Ginneken" <..hidden..>]

On 9/26/06, Chris Travers <..hidden..> wrote:
> I still think that a generic business rules framework would be better
> than an attempt to be specific wrt to this.
>
> Currently the way it works (if this doesn't meet your local
> requirements, let us know what the exact problem is):
>
> Customers are associated with taxes
> Parts are associated with taxes.
> On any given invoice, tax is charged on each line item if and only if
> the customer and the part share the same tax specification.
>
> Again, this doesn't handle some local requirements, which may add
> complex logic to the tax specification.
>
> Best Wishes,
> Chris Travers
>
> On 9/26/06, Tony Fraser <..hidden..> wrote:
> > On Mon, 2006-09-25 at 21:27 -0700, Chris Travers wrote:
> > > THere was talk about adding support at the shipto level.  Not sure if
> > > this really helps though.  It will take more time to adequately define
> > > the appropriate usage model.  Yes, the db schema will need to be
> > > changed if we need to support tax by zipcode (a requirement for
> > > Arkansans, iirc).
> > >
> > > Probably the best solution long-term is to create a system of business
> > > rules-based tax calculation and not tie it into any specific
> > > locale-specific model.
> >
> > My thought for the easiest way to do this... Maybe not the best way:
> >
> > -add a shiptotax table (ala customertax and vendortax).
> > -add a field to the tax table to state whether the tax is based on
> > billto or shipto
> >
> > Personally I like the matrix approach that SQL Ledger/LedgerSMB uses for
> > taxes. All of the rule based tax calculation approaches I've seen have
> > had a short coming in some locale or another or are horribly complex to
> > configure for your locale.
> >
> > The other enhancement I'd like to see if someone is messing around in
> > the tax system is a charttax table and use of said table for AR/AP
> > transactions. I forget who it was that suggested this feature quite some
> > time ago now but I thought at the time: That would be a really nice
> > feature. It was around the time that Dieter added the override check
> > boxes to the AR/AP transaction screen.
> >
> > The other thing that drives me nuts, even a lot of commercial products
> > fall victim to this one, is not allowing for more than one sales tax on
> > an invoice. If we're going to revamp the tax system multiple taxes per
> > invoice is a required feature as far as I'm concerned and I would think
> > that around 70-80% of Canadian business owners are with me on this. In
> > Canada there is a Federal tax and all the provinces, except two I can
> > think of, have a Provincial tax both of which are collectible on most
> > transactions and which have to be remitted separately to different
> > governments.
> >
> > --
> > Tony Fraser
> > ..hidden..
> > Sybaspace Internet Solutions                        System Administrator
> > phone: (250) 246-5368                                fax: (250) 246-5398
> >
> >
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I agree, taxes are very difficult to get right.  My "full-time" job
for now is maintaining/developing a billing (not accounting) system
for a telecom company in the US.  Due to the complexity of telecom
taxes (and the rate they seem to change) we currently use an external
application to process our taxes.  The 2 major players in this area
are Vertex and CCH/Salestax.com.  Basically how they work is we pass
in the applicable geocode for the service, tax exempt status (For
Fed/State/County/Local levels), type of service, amount, etc.., and it
returns an array of applicable taxes already calculated including the
taxing authority and tax type. Nexus can also affect which states we
are responsible to tax.

Here are a listing of tax authorities for reference.

       0 Federal
       1 State
       2 County
       3 City
       4 Local
       5 County Administered by State
       6 City Administered by State
       7 City Administered by County
       8 Local Administered by State
       9 Local Administered by County



Back to LedgerSMB, I guess you could create a similar "tax" module
which will accept tax "plug ins" for the specific need of the client.
Definitely not an easy task to complete.