Re: Locale-specific issues?

["Chris Travers" <..hidden..>]

On 2/5/07, Ed W <..hidden..> wrote:
> Hi
>
> > So I am wondering....  Where are people located.  Are there
> > locale-specific issues you are facing?  If so, what are they?
>
>
> UK
>
> "Issues" are basically tax and procedural kind of issues.
>
> Some things are pretty easy to work around and basically involve better
> default setup of the system for the UK (nothing rocket science).  Others
> are a bit more difficult such as the current VAT system not *quite*
> compliant with what we have over here.  Invoice printing is also
> slightly non-compliant and at least in SL it can't *quite* be made to
> print a completely legal invoice (but it's good enough for most people...)

What are the problems exactly?

In 1.2, we should be able to help you make the VAT compliant because
of the custom tax rule system.  If there are specific invoicing
issues, we would like to hear about them.
> There are some niggling issues which can be worked around such as VAT
> rounding the wrong way occasionally.  Also tax being tied to the
> customer or the "part", whereas for most jurisdictions it's based on the
> delivery address, etc.

That is a common request. Since we are past the feature freeze,
wondering about an add-on or experimental module...
> Also I noticed that it's not easy to handle second hand sales where the
> VAT is based on a margin basis, ie you pay tax only on the amount of
> profit, not on the total sale price

That may pose a little problem and may require some hooks beyond what
we have.  However, I wonder, what you do in the following
circumstance:

Buy one item for $5 (whatever currency)
buy one item of same type for $10 a month later due to price fluctuation

You resale them for $20 each.

Cashier 1 starts to ring up the sale of the first item.
Before cashier 1 finishes, casher 2 starts ringing up the price for
the other item.

How do you determine what your margin is?

Suppose cashier aborts the transaction? Does customer 2 owe more VAT?

Or do you take a VAT credit when you purchase the item for resale?  Or
do you have to track the items using separate identifiers so it is
possible the second one was sold first?

Figure it is a good idea to understand the corner cases before saying
how much is easy to support at the moment.
> Nothing major for the UK, but it would be nice to get some of the above
> smoothed over a bit.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers