County taxes - GA

I had the same problem 5 years ago, ZC and local taxes and had to pay someone in the end to help me.

Now I am at it again and am stuck at the same problem and as I see going through the forum there has not been a lot of progress that is of use to me.

Having my entity in GA, state law requires me to to collect county taxes for the destination county. All counties have either 3% or 4% so that I could group these, Atlanta is 1% as a city plus of course the state 4%. So I would need three zones depending on the zip codes.

USPS has GA in 8 zones incase I need to use this for my S&H.

How can I create zones so that ZC matches the county tax to the zip code? I need simple steps. I have GA as a Zone definition. I am not sure what to create in zones.

Also, in configuration/mystore I cannot choose zone my store is in. Confused.

Hi,
I just read your post. I also have a business in GA and I am now trying to set up ZenCart. Can you shed some light on configuring the taxes? Did you ever resolve the issue of charging tax by destination? I cannot figure out how to do it.
Thanks,
Robert

germerican:

I had the same problem 5 years ago, ZC and local taxes and had to pay someone in the end to help me.

Now I am at it again and am stuck at the same problem and as I see going through the forum there has not been a lot of progress that is of use to me.

Having my entity in GA, state law requires me to to collect county taxes for the destination county. All counties have either 3% or 4% so that I could group these, Atlanta is 1% as a city plus of course the state 4%. So I would need three zones depending on the zip codes.

USPS has GA in 8 zones incase I need to use this for my S&H.

How can I create zones so that ZC matches the county tax to the zip code? I need simple steps. I have GA as a Zone definition. I am not sure what to create in zones.

Also, in configuration/mystore I cannot choose zone my store is in. Confused.

Zen Cart has never collected "tax by county". But it has always handled it fine "by state".

Here's an FAQ article explaining how to configure taxes by state: How do I configure the taxes? (US state sales tax - single rate)

Thank you for your reply. I guess ZenCart cannot be used in most of the USA. I wish I had known that before spending so much time trying to make it work. One would think that while developing such a nice package, the developers would have realized that it is illegal to charge the wrong sales tax to your customers. In many states, sales tax varies not only by county, but even by city or town. You could probably do it by zip code but I don't think ZenCart has that feature.

Do you know of another shopping cart package that handles sales tax correctly?

Thanks,
Robert

DrByte:

Zen Cart has never collected "tax by county". But it has always handled it fine "by state".

Here's an FAQ article explaining how to configure taxes by state: How do I configure the taxes? (US state sales tax - single rate)

rrioja:

Thank you for your reply. I guess ZenCart cannot be used in most of the USA.Clearly you're frustrated, but there's no need to point fingers and slag on well-established software that's actively and accurately serving hundreds of thousands of stores, most of them across the USA.

rrioja:

One would think that while developing such a nice package, the developers would have realized that it is illegal to charge the wrong sales tax to your customers.Actually, they know that quite well, and indeed it handles that very well all around the world.

rrioja:

You could probably do it by zip codeActually, no. County lines and even some city lines span across zip codes, so the granular control you say is so essential is actually a lot more complicated than you think.

rrioja:

Do you know of another shopping cart package that handles sales tax correctly?
Actually, the solution is simple: if you need that much granular control over your specific requirements unique to where your business is registered to collect taxes, then you can use the TaxCloud service and their free plugin. It intercepts each transaction, recalculates taxes based on their monthly-updated tables of required rates, and sets those details into your sales orders. (Granted, even they probably do it only down to the zip level, not the county level.)
So, no need for "another shopping cart".

Dear DrByte,

Thank you for your reply. Yes I am frustrated. I have gone through the forum posts for the last few weeks. Most of the questions regarding taxes by counties (or some other geopolitical area) have gone unanswered. The answeres I did see clearly did not address nor solve the problem. I guess my frustration is merely an echo of what I am reading.

There is a good module called "Local Sales Tax Module" written by LadyHLG. It allows you to collect by what she calls "suburb" which is actually the second address line in the customer record. The problem is, as has been well documented by users, that there is no way to tell the clients to enter their county name in "Address Line 2". Besides, it should only apply for clients who live in your state if you do not collect tax from other states. I have seen requests from her users to have her modify the customer form so that there is a drop-down "County" field that could be used, but she stated that she does not know how to do this.

The frustration so prevalent regarding taxes could be easily dismissed if it was not such a huge problem. Many have said that they use Zen Cart successfully, including tax collection, and I am very happy for them. However, I have also read many posts from users who employ the zip code method even though they know that it is not "perfect". I just hope they never get audited.

I do not know how to reprogram the customer data entry form to add another pull-down field for "Taxing authority". If someone could implement it, then I am sure that LadyHLG could use that field with her module and solve the problem.

Is there anyone out there capable of taking on this task? It seems to me that this is possibly the last hurdle towards making Zen Cart a truly universal open-source shopping cart. I have much programming experience myself, but have no clue where to even begin to look for the necessary "hooks".

I also looked into TaxCloud and other services, but they all have other problems.

Thank you for your time.
Robert

One thing I've seen done is create new zones for each county:

a) Create the 80 counties, named like "GA - ABC County", "GA - DEF County"
b) Create tax rates for each county

Done. Now everyone has to scroll thru the massive list of all counties your store collects taxes for, and choose theirs.

You could do some programming to force a selection if anyone's already got a generic "GA" county in their address book, and make them do a selection before their next checkout.

Yes, that is exactly what I, and others in the forum, have been asking for. What we need is a pull-down for the counties in the customer address form, just like the "State/Province" pull-down that already exists. Ideally, it should appear only after someone selects a state that we have counties for. So we should have a way of creating the counties for each state that is of interest to us. In my case, only Georgia.

Do you think that anyone could implement this? I think that it would solve all the problems that so many of us have to face.

Thank you,
Robert

Adding a separate counties infrastructure requires building a new tax calculation infrastructure.
But simply adding multiple GA state entries (one for each county) lets the existing tax-calculation code handle everything easily.

But there is no way for the customers to tell us what county they are in. They don't even know that we need this information.
Robert

You're misunderstanding what I've said.

a) edit the current Georgia state in your zones list. Change it to "Georgia: Marietta County"
b) then add MORE states for Georgia: one for each county: "Georgia: Appling County", "Georgia: Bacon County", "Georgia: Fulton County", etc ... all 321 of them.

Then configure taxes for each "state" separately.

Done: customers can now easily choose their county, and tax will be applied correctly

OK. I will try to do as you said. I won't be able to get to it until next week. But I will keep you informed. If this works, you should "announce" it vociferously so that all others with this problem will be happy.

Thanks,
Robert