Posted by jhodgdon on July 14, 2008 at 2:51pm
Is anyone using Ubercart to calculate WA state sales tax? The new tax rules are very complex (you have to charge sales tax based on where in WA the item is shipped).
I have a potential client who will need a web site set up soon, and I'm trying to figure out whether I'll need to program up something from scratch, or if something exists. Any guidance will be much appreciated... I am at this time new to Ubercart...
--Jennifer
Comments
Yes, WA sales tax is
Yes, WA sales tax is definitely possible, if a little convoluted. Mercedessource.com calculates WA sales tax.
You have to use workflow-ng to create the conditionals. You set the tax rate however in ubercart's tax configuration page.
A *little* convoluted?
I think it's more than a little convoluted, under the latest tax law, as of July 1st. Did you implement the full complexity? It looks like you have to:
a) Use one lookup table to convert an address to a "location code" -- this is a 9 MB plain text file (!) to decode
b) Use another lookup table to convert the location code to a tax rate
And it looks like both of these lookup tables can change quarterly.
http://dor.wa.gov/content/FindTaxesAndRates/SalesAndUseTaxRates/stdownlo...
Otherwise, maybe the web lookup could be used and its result parsed:
http://dor.wa.gov/Mobile/SalesTaxRatesCe.aspx
What was your approach?
--Jennifer
Drupal programmer - http://poplarware.com
Drupal author - http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920034612.do
Drupal contributor - https://www.drupal.org/u/jhodgdon
Hey Jakob, I'm pretty sure
Hey Jakob,
I'm pretty sure Mercedessource.com isn't doing it right according to the new rules that went into effect on 7/1/08. The reason I say that is because taxes are calculated in an AJAX call, and the JavaScript used on the Mercedessource.com site is the unmodified uc_taxes.js which can't work because it doesn't send the street address and town back to the server. Without those, the server doesn't have enough information to calculate the destination-based sales tax.
Wa taxes
any one got it working for the new tax rules?
Ah, they have a web interface
I just found this too, they have a web interface:
http://dor.wa.gov/Content/FindTaxesAndRates/RetailSalesTax/DestinationBa...
Drupal programmer - http://poplarware.com
Drupal author - http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920034612.do
Drupal contributor - https://www.drupal.org/u/jhodgdon
Interesting... I wonder if
Interesting... I wonder if Florida has anything like this... their taxes are crazy, too.
I'll bookmark this post. We're changing the setup on the UC side for taxes b/c the UI was confusing for UC 1.x. Ideally we'll implement the possibility for modules to define a callback that can return a tax rate, and you can use that to ping the tax server in a small custom module.
I'll bookmark this thread and pass a link onto Lyle to look over.
Great, thanks!
I guess I should have posted it on the Ubercart forum too... I skimmed the discussion there about Florida, which also looks really convoluted. I think more states may be going to destination-based taxes -- I doubt WA thought it up in a vacuum.
I do think the best option for WA would be to use their web service. Those types of web service calls are pretty easy to implement in a few lines of PHP code, and since they're updating their lists of areas and rates every quarter, it seems like using their service would be the only way to guarantee things were kept up to date.
--Jennifer
Drupal programmer - http://poplarware.com
Drupal author - http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920034612.do
Drupal contributor - https://www.drupal.org/u/jhodgdon
Found a pay web service too
Someone on the WordPress dev list (I'm not exclusively a Drupal maven) just recommended this service:
http://www.serviceobjects.com/products/dots_fasttax.asp
It's basically a web service that claims to do sales tax (correctly?) for all of US and Canada. It might be interesting to see if they get WA and/or Florida correct. They're not exactly cheap, but they have a free trial-period account you can get to test.
And by the way the person who recommended it said they hadn't been using it for long. He said it was super-easy to set up PHP code to call it, but he wasn't sure yet about reliability.
Drupal programmer - http://poplarware.com
Drupal author - http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920034612.do
Drupal contributor - https://www.drupal.org/u/jhodgdon
Hmm, my post didn't get
Hmm, my post didn't get through - looks like it was tagged as spam... I'm not about to try to rewrite it, let me just summarize and say I've worked on this and have it pretty much done.
(So what's the deal with the spam stuff - the site told me my post was potentially spam and asked me to do a captcha, but the post never showed - does it have to be approved by the group owner or something?)
Sales tax via web service
Sabrix provides sales tax results for all jurisdictions in the US via web services. You can email me at jon.oesch@sabrix.com if you would like to learn more.
Preliminary module available...
I have just completed the first pass at a WA sales tax Ubercart module.
The original client fell through back in July, but I came up with two more people who needed it this week. So I went ahead and did it, GPL licensed. I haven't released it publicly yet, but if anyone wants to test it, contact me through my contact form or on my web site (http://poplarware.com) and I'll send you the zip. I plan to put it on my web site for download, as well as in the Ubercart contrib area, but I might wait until it's been tested a little more.
Drupal programmer - http://poplarware.com
Drupal author - http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920034612.do
Drupal contributor - https://www.drupal.org/u/jhodgdon
First official module version released
I made some improvements to the module, and posted the first public version on the Ubercart contrib site: http://www.ubercart.org/contrib/8311
Drupal programmer - http://poplarware.com
Drupal author - http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920034612.do
Drupal contributor - https://www.drupal.org/u/jhodgdon