Local Sales Tax Mod - Support Thread

Snicklefritz,
I believe what jprough did was use the zone taxes for zen cart to set up a state wide sales tax and then used the mod to apply additional sales tax to specific zip codes.

LadyHLG

LadyHLG:

Snicklefritz,
I believe what jprough did was use the zone taxes for zen cart to set up a state wide sales tax and then used the mod to apply additional sales tax to specific zip codes.

LadyHLG

Yes!! It works now! thanks.

If you are a knitter, I should send you free yarn for writing a great mod :smile:

Glad everything is working now.
I did try knitting a while back but all I could ever seem to make was pot holders and scarfs. Anything more complicated than that and I was lost! :P

Have a good weekend!
LadyHLG

LadyHLG,

Thank you for this add-on. It is, by far, the best solution for those who do business in states that apply sales tax based on the destination address. I am currently using it on http://www.randylion.com.

As I read through the thread, I understand that the mod does not perform the tax calculations if a discount coupon is applied to the subtotal. I've verified that it doesn't. I'd like to try to tackle this problem.

Do you have any pointers on where I could change the calculations? In ot_local_sales_taxes.php, it loops through the items in the cart and calculates the subtotal based on a matching tax class id. I have only one tax class set for my products and local tax table. It seems that I could just subtract the discount coupon from this calculation - or am I oversimplifying the problem?

Thanks,
kjconnects

I am having a problem with how local tax module interacts with one of the shipping modules:

My store is in (the city of) Denver and I have a local tax set up for Denver. Tax basis is set to 'shipping'.

I need to add the local Denver tax to every order that uses 'Store Pickup', regardless of what the shipping address is set to. But I need to offer store pickup to all zones, not just Denver.

Is there a way I can modify ot_local_sales_taxes.php to do this? The local sales tax module is working great on all my other shipping modules, but for store pickup it only shows local tax if the shipping address is set to Denver.

(I honestly don't know why ZenCart restricts using the Store as the tax basis the way it does! Flaw of ZC in my opinion.)

Thank you thank you thank you for any help you can offer! :cool:

Hello Zenners,
Sorry I've been a bit absent lately, but I've started a new job and my time is limited.

BassFace,
I actually have an update to resolve this issue. I'm not currently at home and so can not upload it. As soon as I can I will add this update to the uploads section for you.

kjconnects,
Yes coupons are a bit of a problem. Its been a while since I dealt with them so I will have to go back and take a look, hopefully we can come up with a solution.

LadyHLG

LadyHLG:

Hello Zenners,
Sorry I've been a bit absent lately, but I've started a new job and my time is limited.

BassFace,
I actually have an update to resolve this issue. I'm not currently at home and so can not upload it. As soon as I can I will add this update to the uploads section for you.

LadyHLG

OMG, you are a gem, indeed! Thank you! I can't wait to see what you've done, as I was giving myself a migraine trying to figure out how to make it work on my own! :smile:

Thank you for this excellent MOD and for continuing to support it and support it's users. As a writer of phpbb mods I truly understand how much time and effort goes into a mod and it's support, so thank you again!

LadyHLG, do you have an idea of when the update you mentioned will be available to download? Thanks again.

BassFace and anyone else interested,
I have uploaded version 2.4 of the mod with support for taxing in store pickup. The download has both a full install version and an upgrade version for 2.3 users.

The readme file has instructions on how to use this new feature, I tried to make it as clear as possible, but it may still seem confusing so please read it carefully!

As always back up the database and store files before installing!!:smile:

Good Luck!
LadyHLG

Thank you LadyHLG. But we need to wait til it shows up in the Contributions section for download, correct?

Yes, hopefully it will be up soon.

LadyHLG

LadyHLG,
I can't seem to get this 2.4 update working. Local tax is still not being applied to Store Pickup items.

I've attached a screenshot of the Modules>OrderTotal>Local Sales Tax edit screen; there is an unlabeled text field and it does not accept input. I tried entering some text, click 'Update' but what I entered isn't saved. In the 2.4 package there was no /admin folder and no sql fileinside the 'Upgrade Only' folder. Is this correct or is something missing?

Thanks for your continued help. I'm lost and need your assistance to get this working for my store! :cool:

Hello Zenners!
It appears there may be an issue with the 2.4 upgrade only files. (I think I may have missed a file in the upgrade folder).
So while I am trying to determine what the issue is please do the following to upgrade your Local Sales Tax Mod to version 2.4.

Step 1 - Completely disregard the upgrade only folder!!!

Step 2 - Make note of your Local Sales Tax Admin settings and then uninstall the Local Sales Tax Mod via the zen cart Admin (ie - click the "REMOVE" button in the admin interface. Don't worry this will not delete your database sales tax info, it just deactivates the mod).

Step 3 - Copy over all the files from the Full Version Folder - overwrite all the mod files.

Step 4 - Reinstall the mod via the admin and set things up based on the previous setting from Step 2.

Step 5 - Follow the instruction in the README file included with the mod to use the new Store Pickup taxation option.

Step 6 -Sleep well at night knowing you are providing your local government with proper financial support! :D

I will try to get a look at the mod install as soon as possible to correct the issue.

Cheers!

LadyHLG

Hello Heather (your a saint to help all of us) and anyone else that might be able to shed some light.
I am a New York stater suffering through the county tax headache and I appreciate all the info on the forum already. I started to add in the county information and then saw the posting from 'therealex' that included an SQL file of zen_tax_rates_local.sql with the tread quoted below. I pasted the sql file into my site (http://atriatechnologies.com/store/) but can not make things work.
1 Does the local sales tax mod connect to this database insertion that 'therealex' included? (zen_tax_rates_local.sql)
2. Can the insertion be removed if necessary?
3. Is there a procedure to connect the two?
4. Is there an easier way to add in all the counties one by one per the instruction on the local sales tax mod as currently written?
I'm dying here, any help is appreciated. Thanks so much.
Jamie
PS: ZenCart version 1.3.8, Local sales tax mod 2.3, I do have customer tax exempt mod installed and it is working, Cherry zen template, edit orders mod installed.

= - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - = - =

sugarhill:

therealex, thanks for this table! Very useful to those of us developing in NYC...

As of Sept 1, 2009 the tax rates have changed. While I was updating the rates in the table, I also slightly improved the table to bring it more in line with NYS Dept of Taxation & Finance Publication 718 - tax rates by jurisdiction code. I combined all the county labels for NYC by renaming Kings, Queens, etc to 'New York City' and also added in the city exceptions to the county rates as outlined in Pub 718 (such as "Ithaca City Tax").

Since zip codes to not accurately define cities and tax jurisdictions, I make no warranty or claims as to the accuracy of your NYS Sales Tax returns based on this table. The only way to be 100% accurate is to use the NYS Sales Tax Jurisdiction and Rate Lookup (located here: http://www8.nystax.gov/STLR/stlrHome). However, they provide no API, so you can't do the lookup programmatically at the time of online sale.

This updated table is meant to replace your zen_tax_rates_local table via a complete INSERT, which means you should backup(EXPORT) and DROP your table first. Then just IMPORT the new table from the .sql file you downloaded and unzipped.
Here's the updated table (enjoy!):

Tesla,
From what I can see, the sql file creates a table called zen_tax_rates_local. The problem here is that unless your store uses "zen_" as a table prefix, it wont work with the mod.
So you need to go into the database and rename that table with whatever you used for a table prefix (or delete the "zen_" in the table name if you didn't assign a table prefix for your store).

Hope that makes sense.

LadyHLG

Lady Heather, you certainly are a genius and an angel. :clap:

Congratulations on the job, I hope you're happy and comfortable there.

If you ever do get an opportunity to make more enhancements on this... when you have time, and after ZenCart 2.0...

I'm one of the people afflicted by the Washington state destination tax joy. (I'm amazed that got passed... the municipalities that seem to be the most affected are the ones with the least bargaining power... but I digress. :smile:)

After reading the hundreds of posts about this, I created a compromise solution -- I'm a programmer by day, compromise solutions are my life -- and it's only going to "work" for me because my sales volume is going to be low enough that I can manually verify each transaction and refund any overage (which will be a max of about forty five cents).

Where I'm going with this... There are probably complicated answers that will give us 100% compliance, but I think that even a compromise solution would be a whole lot closer if we could match on 5-digit zip code and a city name that's populated using a drop-down. I don't know if that's possible, php is not one of the seventeen or so languages I write in, but if it is, it would probably get us to 95% or so.

What This Is:
Within about half hour, not including reading all this documentation, you can get a New YorkState tax solution in place that works really well. I have documented what I have learned from others on the forum by their posts and some help. I have made modifications to sql files that 'therealex' posted and described the changes in detail. The implementation is the zip code implementation that does have limitations around some parts of NY where the zip crosses counties or something like that.

My intent is to share what I have learned in the documentation attached. The upload could not handle the screen shots due to file size so I uploaded it to here and attached my doc file without the images:
http://www.frontiernet.net/~tesla/zencart/ANewYorkStateLocalSalesTaxSolutionDocumentation.doc

I got this solution working two ways and describe what the differences are. I hope this helps others. Disclaimer: I know enough to be dangerous and am not a programmer and think I have this working properly.

Please see the attached two zip files. (doc and 3 sql files)

Special Thanks and Recognition to:

• Zen Cart user LadyHLG for writing the Local Sales Tax Mod and answering good and stupid questions from lots of people including me! I REALLY appreciate all you have done!
• The folks at BushkillFarms.com for making the New York State Zen Cart SQL file with all the zip codes in it and posted on the Forum by user “therealex.” I REALLY appreciate that too. See his posting of 14th September 2009, 09:59 PM (thread #223) with subject Re: Local Sales Tax Mod - Support Thread

jamie

Tesla,
Thank-you for sharing what you have learned. Its whats makes the zen community so great!

Best of luck to you!

LadyHLG

I am having the same issue as some of your other users where if I use a discount coupon with taxes, the coupon is not subtracted. If no taxes, the coupon is works fine. After changing the order to apply the coupon after the tax, it works in a confusing way.

Get total showing
and tax is based on that total correctly
then is shows the coupon subtracted at face value,
but with my settings it does correctly subtract the coupon and any tax on that amount. That is correct because you cannot tax on what they did not spend.

So overall the calculations are correct, but it will confuse the customer. Also, I am creating a summary tax report, and that becomes an issue because the tax showing is for the city and state, but the values are on the sub totals before any discounts. So the amounts showing on the report are incorrect since we did not collect say 4% on $45, but rather 4% on $20 because of a $25 coupon.

Has there been any progress on a possible fix? If I could apply the coupon before the tax, the tax would be calculated correctly and stored in the DB correctly and my customers would see the actual tax they were charged correctly.

Please Please Help, our site is live and I want them to be able to use discount coupons.

Zen 1.3.8a
Tax module 2.4

Thanks, and I do love the mod. Good work. :clap:

Hello,

I have the local sales tax modification (ver 2.4) working very well with ZC ver 1.3.8 in New York with 2260-ish zip codes in NY.

I have a problem where if a customer is in NY (my state) I need to charge tax but if the customer has their home address zip with zip+4, 9 digit zip with the form 12345-6789 format of zip code, they do not get charged tax.

Is there any way to modify the read of the customer's zip code and truncate all but the first 5 digits before it does the compare and search the database table. I could not find any other information/postings in the forum on this subject. Does everyone have this problem? Any suggestions appreciated. Thank you.