Local Sales Tax Mod - Support Thread

I've installed the mod without any problems.

Is it possible to collapse all of the local sales taxes into 1 line? Instead of listing county, special district and city taxes, I would like it to combine all of these and just show "local sales tax" and the combined percentage.

I'm sorry but at present this is not an option, it might be something to consider for a future release, but I will most likely not be doing any more updates until after Zen Cart v2.0 is released.

LadyHLG

LadyHLG:

I will most likely not be doing any more updates until after Zen Cart v2.0 is released.

LadyHLG, thank you again for the marvelous job you have done here.

I hope that you will still be able to release a quick patch/fix as I discovered a glitch/pitfall in the current version: If the customer enters a ZIP+4 code, and the Local Sales Tax Mod is configured to use Zip Codes (instead of city/town names), then the Mod will not calculate local tax for that customer.

In a way, it is similar to the problem of a user entering "S Royalton" or "S. Royalton" instead of "South Royalton"... except that the ZIP+4 code problem is easily solvable in the PHP code.

(BTW, limiting the customers to enter only 5 digits for the zip code as a workaround might not be a good idea as there are countries in which there are more than 5 characters in the zip code)

Hi Lady HLG, thank you for creating and supporting such a fundamental module for ZenCart. I have a site to launch with the 2.8 Zencart. Just upgraded my local tax module and am not seeing it applied.

The store only sells in U.S., only charges 7.25% in Ca and only needs to add 1% local tax to the SF zips 94101-to-94188

I installed the module, set up a local tax to apply to the zone California (which is the only defined zone and shows the two following tax rates).
The only tax rates are Taxable California 7.25% and non-taxable California.
The only tax classes are taxable and non-taxable.

Here is the error message, if you or anyone could interpret it for me it would be greatly appreciated, I have a tough time understanding the taxes, even with the ZenCart book.

DEBUG MESSAGE: Local Tax Rec ID: 1
Tax Name: - .00

Tax based on customer billing zone 12
1 matching tax zones found

(YOUR TOTAL fieldset)

 $90.00
 Sub-Total:


  $9.95
 Shipping Cost (FedEx - Regular Ground ( 7-10 days) ($9.95)):


  $6.53
 CA Sales Tax:


  $106.48
 Total:

Thank you for any help.
Julie

askjv:

Hi Lady HLG, thank you for creating and supporting such a fundamental module for ZenCart. I have a site to launch with the 2.8 Zencart.

Did you mean ZenCart version 1.3.8?
What version of the mod are you using?

From the output you posted something strange is happening with the mod but I cant be sure if its a bug or some kind of setup issue.

If you are running the current version can you turn on Level 2 Debugging and either post the output or send it to me via pm?

LadyHLG

Another thank you for this module, Lady HLG.

I have a few questions of you or anyone who has gotten this set up for CA.

I'm using current version Zen v1.3.8 Local Sales Tax Mod v2-3. Initially I used the county method which worked fantastically but returned an address like:

Name
Street
City
CA- County
zip

This was okay but my boss wanted his ability to print shipping labels from PayPal so I switched us from PayPal IPN to Express Checkout. PayPal did not like the CA-County set up for State and didn't add taxes on. In a different thread I saw some very casual discussion of converting "CA. - County" into just "CA" so it works with PayPal. I didn't bookmark that thread and hope I've remembered enough for this question to make sense.

The other question I had is based on post #80 in this thread. So, after realizing I wouldn't get taxes added through Express checkout, not with the way I had counties set up, I've tinkered with it and gone this route:

One California Zone tax -Flat rate tax for everyone 7.25% (Order_Total sort order 299, zone priority 1)

A local tax through the mod of .5% to get my home county tax of 7.75% (using city;city;city to search)

and an additional local tax through the mod for my city of 1.0%, city tax of 8.75% (using zip-zip to search)

State tax is added but not the additional (upcharges?) to get to county or city tax.

What might I be missing to make the county and city tax work, so customer is charged either CA tax or CA tax+.5% if the live in my county, or CA tax =1% if they live in my city?

JinkyO,
To help you correct the issue with paypal we will need some help from someone more familiar with PayPal Express to find where to update the code to strip the unwanted extra characters from the state, not a difficult thing to do, but I really dont have the time to search the code to find it right now.

As for your other issue, did you turn on debugging for the mod? If so what did you get for output?

LadyHLG

Hi,

I just started working on a new store and I need have a sales tax solution for Ohio. Is the mod going to work with Ohio Sales Tax as is or I need some custom change. Please help.

Thanks

I'm afraid I am not familiar with the specific needs of Ohio sales tax so I can't really answer that.
Can you provide more information?

LadyHLG

Ohio sales tax is charged based on county and Zip code. I previously used an oscommerce contrib(http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/2956) on a OscMax site. Not sure the same one will work for Zen-cart or not.

Thanks

If you set up Ohio counties as zones and then use the local mod to create the sales taxes by zip code then yes this will work.

There is a section in the mod README file called Helpful Tips that explains how to set up state counties as zones.

From there you would have to create each zip code based sales tax for each county.

I hope that answers your question.

LadyHLG

I'll give it a try.

Thank you.

LadyHLG,

Would this mod work for the distination based sales tax that is by streets and blocks? Basically Washington State now calculates what is called destination based sales tax. It is not calculated by city or zip, but it can actually change by block! It is very frustrating, but what can you do you know?

Anyways, this looks like it may be the solution, just thought I would see what your thoughts are about it.

So I decided this mod was probably the best solution for WA destination based sales tax. When I went to install the SQL script though it simply says "failed" no error message given or anything. I am trying to install v2.2 on 1.3.8 any idea what's going on?
Posted via Mobile Device

LadyHLG:

JinkyO,
To help you correct the issue with paypal we will need some help from someone more familiar with PayPal Express to find where to update the code to strip the unwanted extra characters from the state, not a difficult thing to do, but I really dont have the time to search the code to find it right now.

As for your other issue, did you turn on debugging for the mod? If so what did you get for output?

LadyHLG

Thanks for getting back to me and thank you for your reply to someone else in post #90 of this thread because that really helped me understand how this mod works. Since posting I think I solved my problems.

A few things I'd messed up on my end where:
forgetting the "-to-" separator between my zipcodes, I was just doing zipcode-zipcode.

Also in the "zen" moments of throwing baby and bathwater around, I'd set the sort order for local tax higher than the zone tax.

So after fixing the first, the local taxes did add in but weren't being displayed as "local tax $xx" And after fixing the second I got everything sorted.

On the other issue of stripping out characters from the PayPal Express module, I don't need that anymore. This set up (applying local tax atop my State tax) works perfectly.

LadyHLG:

Ok, so instead of uploading the file, open it (you can open it with any type of text editor). Copy everything in the file and paste it into the query execution box on the Install sql patches page.
If it fails again try adding a semicolon ";" at the end of the last line.

Looks like some others were getting the same 'failed' response when installing this mod. So I went thru the thread and found this and it worked. Add the semi-colon at the end of the pasted SQL query voila!.

OK I thought it was all working, at least the SQL work and I have the local sales tax module in the total and under the tax rates.

I added one city (Lynnwood) with a tax rate of 9.5% (I also just tried the zip code) but nothing shows up on the check out page and it is NOT added to the total.

Any thoughts? I tried from scratch 2.2, added 2.3 and still nothing add to the cart.

Here is the debug results:
Your Total Local Tax Rec ID: 1
Tax Name: -

Tax based on customer shipping zone 62
1 matching tax zones found

$8.00
Sub-Total:

$6.45
United States Postal Service (1 x 0.26lbs) (Priority Mail (2 - 3 days)):

$1.28
WA State Sales Tax:

$15.73
Total:

inkuyo:

OK I thought it was all working, at least the SQL work and I have the local sales tax module in the total and under the tax rates.

I added one city (Lynnwood) with a tax rate of 9.5% (I also just tried the zip code) but nothing shows up on the check out page and it is NOT added to the total.

Any thoughts? I tried from scratch 2.2, added 2.3 and still nothing add to the cart.

Here is the debug results:
Your Total Local Tax Rec ID: 1
Tax Name: -

Tax based on customer shipping zone 62
1 matching tax zones found

$8.00
Sub-Total:

$6.45
United States Postal Service (1 x 0.26lbs) (Priority Mail (2 - 3 days)):

$1.28
WA State Sales Tax:

$15.73
Total:

I figured it out. It has to do with the case sensitivity of the city name, AND the billing location (not the shipping location).

So Example: bothell is NOT the same as Bothell.

Now I just have to think about how to implement this....

A Correction The tax is based on the Shipping Address.

inkuyo,
Try this:
Open the following file.
\includes\modules\order_total\ot_local_sales_taxes.php

at about line 170 find

if($myfield == $value){

and replace it with

if(strtolower($myfield) == strtolower($value)){

See if that fixes the issue.

LadyHLG