Sales Tax by Shipping Location

Hi,

I'm not sure if there's an actual way to do this with Hika, so please let me know. NY state law requires that I charge sales tax to all goods shipped within New York State. Each county, however, has a different Sales Tax rate, and so I must have a field or rule that asks NY residents to select the county to which the item is being shipped. The corresponding tax rate would then be applied. So, for example, if a customer from Albany, NY purchases an item, a sales tax of 8% will be charged, but if a customer from Suffolk purchases an item, the rate of 8.625% will be applied. Customers in other states will have no sales tax applied at all.


Of course, the easiest way would be to have a rule that checks the zip codes in the ship to address and apply the correct sales tax, but I fear that is asking too much.

Thank you and kind regards,

Giacomo

Hi,

You can create new zones of the type "tax zones", one per county plus one zone "outside NY". Then, in Display->Custom fields, you need to edit the address_country field and change its zone to "tax zones" and his label to "County". That is needed because only the fields address_country and address_state are taken into account for taxes. You can also create a new field of type zone and with the zone "countries" if you allow internationnal sales so that your customers can still choose their country.
Then, in System->Taxation, you can create tax rules limited to each county, and the taxes will be applied based on the county selected by the user.

It's a work around but that should do it.

Remember that you need to create at least a tax category and set this tax category in your rules and in your products so that the tax rules will be applied based on the tax category of the product.

I believe I have done all this (for Ohio in my case)... and I cannot get the taxes to calculate on checkout. It goes all the way to PayPal checkout without ever calculating taxes. Don't know what I'm doing wrong. I have set main tax zone to US and tried it... no success. Then I set it to Ohio, no success. Set up customer type as individual for my county. I am logged in as administrator, I have selected my county and information on checkout... and I get no tax calculation when I go to check out. Help?

If you enter something in the "company name" field, you will be considered as a company not an individual. Same if you changed the "default customer type" option in the configuration to something other than individual.

Also, you need to make sure that your field's name is address_state or address_country. Those are the two only possible names for taxes.

Also, by default, on the front end, taxes are calculated based on your "main tax zone" option. If you set it to one of your counties, you should see the tax applied everywhere on the front end. After you enter your address, it will be calculated based on your address.

>>If you enter something in the "company name" field, you will be considered as a company not an individual. Same if you changed the >>"default customer type" option in the configuration to something other than individual.

I didn't enter anything in the company name field for myself. Default customer type is individual and same for my county.

>>Also, you need to make sure that your field's name is address_state or address_country. Those are the two only possible names for taxes.

The name is still address_country. I changed the display name to Counties so it would reflect the counties in my state and set zone to tax zones.

>>Also, by default, on the front end, taxes are calculated based on your "main tax zone" option. If you set it to one of your counties, >>you should see the tax applied everywhere on the front end. After you enter your address, it will be calculated based on your address.

I set that to Ohio. Should I set it to something else? I also set it to one of my counties to test it... and still no effect. The cart does not add taxes in at checkout. I am stumped!!

What on earth could be wrong?

Ok so Nicolas figured out the problem. What INCREDIBLE support for this product!

Here are excerpts from his emails to me:

As I said in the post on the forum, only the fields address_state and
address_country are used for taxes.
However, the address_state field has the precedence over the
address_country field.
So, if both are filled, the address_state field will be used.
In your case, the counties are on the address_country field. And the
states on the address_state field.
You should swap both so that the address_country field displays the
states and the address_state field display the counties.

That got things working.

Now the site is working and calculating taxes for each county without issue.

THANK YOU! Your support is second to none!

Nicolas

Just want to say I love the HikaShop and your level of support is beyond my expectations.

Would you consider adding a zip/county combo tax plugin for US-based customers?
I am not sure how many USA states are going to mostly county-based taxation, but WA did this a couple of years back.

I'd be willing to pay for the package... ie make my clients pay.

Thx!

~Dano

We do propose our services in such cases. You can use our contact form to request a quote. Please explain how you would see this and/or how the county/zip tax system works so that we can see how we would implement it.

I guess what I am asking is really a feature request for US customers.

It would appear that US customer's require a tertiary tax zone specific to zip codes.

So just as a country's sub-zone is a state, states sub-zones are zip codes.

It's noted but could you explain more how taxes work for you ?
Is it based on the county ? Are the zip codes ranges or sometimes the tax will vary randomly based on the zip code ?
We need more information in order to have a clearer view of what could be implemented.

US Tax code is certainly overly verbose and inefficient, and to be honest, truly I barely know my own state!

Is it based on the county ?

In WA state, it appears the best we could try to do is try to match a tax rate to a zip code.
The taxes within the county varies too much.

To be specific, there is a 6.5% tax rate for the state.
Then they place different taxes depending on your zip code, anywhere from .5% to 3.0%.
Clearly, they are making like difficult for us.

Are the zip codes ranges or sometimes the tax will vary randomly based on the zip code ?

I am sure some ranges would apply:
e.g. 98178 - 98199

And then some may share the same rate but are not continuous, so comma-separated would work:
e.g. 98145, 98166, etc.

In the case, of my client is a chef who makes gourmet meals ready for delivery.
So she can only hand-deliver to about 30 zip codes.
Thus, we are not entering alot of tax zones.

She does apply a charge per delivery zone. So in our case, we added all her delivery zones to the manual shipping plugin.
IF that location entry could also apply the taxes, we'd be done.

I look forward to fully learning the software, but I have to say I am a bit confounded and confused about creating a tax category mixed with attributes relating to the product type and to the customer location -- is this true or not? I think more examples would assist.

But if I could offer my 2 cents, then I'd do this:

1) apply a tax category in the 'Add a product' admin form based ONLY on the product type (not used in our case but still, of course great for countries requiring different taxes per industry)

2) apply a tax category to the customer's location.

Country would be #1 for national tax of VAT
State would be #2 for state tax
Zip code would be #3 which varies alot in our state


In the US, as far as I know, we normally tax all e-commerce items at the same tax rate based ONLY on customer's location. Thus, we don't apply a tax category to a product based on its type, e.g. food vs electronics.

Thanks again for your continued development and your attentive support.

Truly, this is why I chose HikaShop. Your level of support and dedication to improvements are the best I ever encountered.

Thank you for your explanation. We'll look at adding zip based restrictions on tax rules in the future. It shouldn't be too complicated to do.

For your suggestion, that's actually how HikaShop works:
You set a tax category for each of your products (so that you can have different taxes for different industries).
Then, you create tax rules based on the user type (company, individual), the location (zones, eg. country or state) and the tax category (that you choose in the products).
What's missing right now is some additional fields in order to restrict a tax rule to zip ranges so that you would be able to do what you want.

Yes, I think if you added that, you'd have more customers in the U.S. and certainly add it to Joomla extension features.

My other big wish is the Checkout page could list all ordered products with their characteristics and variants.

Then you have one page to review your order and alter any needed add-ons besides just the quantity.

Hey, I am allowed to wish (aren't I?) ... if wishes were horses, they'd spook easily.

For the characteristics on the cart/checkout, everything is possible, but that's not so easy as there will be a lot of code to add for that. The system already works well on the product page so that's a low priority for now. It's a nice idea but we have more pressing things to do first

Not sure if this would be easier to implement, but is possible to use the city field as tertiary level for taxes? This would become a drop-down choice (no text entry).

So, country, state, then city ...

I suppose I could co-opt country as the single state my client serves "Washington", and then states as Cities... here I could pick my tax rate.

But that third level would be nice

City restriction is not practical as it won't work for everyone, specially when users can write the name of the city in different languages, like in Switzerland for example. Zip code on the other end are universal.

Yes, I could see that...

If I pursue using a state as country-type field and a zip code (or a city) as a state-type field which is suggested in other posts, correct?

Will PayPal still be populated with the correct address info?
Of course, I know it depends how you do it... but will this require more work (or perhaps hidden fields for paypal)

I notice on states you can add sub-zones -- Is there any way to utilize these sub-zones for tax purposes?

Thx again for the great software, joomla is lucky to have such a component!

If you do like you're saying, paypal won't get the correct fields. It's however possible to override the paypal_end.php file in your template and set back the data in the correct fields with a few lines of code.
The two only fields on which the tax system bases itself are address_country and address_state. You can create other zones but if they aren't displayed by the system in address_country or address_state, they won't be used for the taxes.

Hi Nicolas, I added the zones manually as well as the tax rates. I read through the instructions in this post and still don't understand. At this point I'm just finagling with switches turning things on and off and don't really know what to do beyond adding the tax zones for the parishes. Your help has been and will be greatly appreciated Nicolas.

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