Taxes

There does not seem to be any place to supply or deal with taxes. We have to charge taxes on anything shipped to NJ fortunately a simple statewide tax percent.

Before we moved we used to have to charge NY sales taxes which require huge tables as they are not even constant for a zipcode. I still have the required tables but they are not up-to-date. They require pretty constant maintenance.

Comments

Comment #1

moshe weitzman commented 25 February 2004 at 12:48

Component:	payment.module	» store.module
Priority:	Critical	» Normal

Taxes are really, really complicated. This feature request is on the order of magnitude of a taxonomy.module. Every tax authority has different algorithms. Europe has the VAT.

We would do well to borrow code/design from a mature project for this feature.

Comment #2

yktdan commented 25 February 2004 at 18:15

I agree, really complicated, BUT required by law. I can't process a credit card without including the taxes and must have some way of getting them added to the total price.

At the least let the user supply a % for their locality and add it on.

The only other choice is to increase prices enough to eat the tax.

Comment #3

matt westgate commented 25 February 2004 at 18:43

I will gladly accept patches that add this functionality using a modular approach. One could also look to oscommerce for framework ideas.

Comment #4

plato commented 17 March 2004 at 13:55

Would it not be possible to at least set a base VAT % level in the store config and have a VAT-eligible flag on the product definition? Then it would be a simple matter to add a tax field on the invoice and cart checkout. I'm being selfish here because I live in Europe, so I only care about VAT :-)

Comment #5

svemir commented 21 March 2004 at 03:03

I am using osCommerce for one production site and the way their system works is that you have a way of defining geographical regions and taxes for those regions. It works quite well - but only if you only need one or few tax regions. Imagine if you had a business presence in several states, and at least one of them was like Kansas, where sales tax is different for every city (or something like that...)

Here is an interesting discussion about sales taxes and some software solutions: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum22/5.htm (a little old, but still useful)

I do not have the time to look now, but it would be so cool if there was an open-source initiative to gather all the various sales tax calculations in a single database, web service, or something. So far I only found places like www.simpova.com which charge a monthly fee ($15 and up.)

Some credit card processing services seem to have tools to help you with this, but even if you use them, sometimes you may accept a check or PayPal or something, and you are back to having to calculate (and keep records of) taxes "yourself."

P.S. I am willing to help with patching the E-Commerce module to support at least a simple tax model, or something similar to osCommerce. If anybody started working on this, please get in touch with me for any help. Otherwise, I will suggest some general way of solving this here before starting to code.