Local Sales Tax Mod (with admin!) for testing

Ook.. nevermind... I found the solution. It appears it wasn't turned in the 'order totals' section and now it works like a charm. Thanks again for the mod!

Its always the simple things that cause the most problems. Glad everything is working for you now.

LadyHLG

I started playing with this again. Very cool mod! Maybe I'll get my online sales ready before Christmas after all.

How hard would it be to include a field that only appears when running reports? My state uses something called a "COPO" to identify tax jurisdictions, and expects reports to be made according to COPO and not city/county/zip/whatever. At the moment I have this in the tax label field, but I'd rather not confuse customers with it.

(Actually, there are multiple overlapping COPOs for any given transaction. We have to report taxes for each COPO separately. But supporting something like that almost sounds like real work.)

It would also be nice if zen cart could somehow automatically look up ZIP+4 given the rest of the customer's address. But again, that would be a lot of work -- I've seen the technical specs from the US Postal Service. Also they're very snooty about who gets access.

Adding a report only field might get a bit tricky given that the report mod does not actually retrieve any data from the tax table. It would have to be modified to look up the extra data from the tax table. The tax mod would would also have to be modified to allow you to enter the info via the admin.
Not something that would be impossible, but I don't have the time at the moment to work on it.
If you are comfortable editing the sql tables directly I might be able to meet you half way, you would need to add the info to the tax table and I could try to add the functionality to the report mod to look it up.
Also, I should mention that if you are using zones for any part of the taxes (ie - county taxes) and need the same functionality for those taxes then that changes things completely.

LadyHLG

Can you set up your Search Data field for Zip Codes to search a string for multiple zip codes at ones...(i.e. 90001-93050)?

Zidain~

Zidain and anyone else interested,

I am attaching an upgrade to the mod that will allow you to use a zip code range. Please be sure to read the included readme.txt file for specific instructions on how to set up your data to work with the mod correctly.

I have not a much time for testing, so please let me know if you run into any problems.

LadyHLG

nice, thanks a lot lady... I'll DL it tonight and let you know what happens.

Also, and it might be difficult but what about adding in a "county feild" under shipping and then using that to do the tax...that's exactly how it would work in California.

Zidain~

Actually, a county field is something that has been under discussion for a long time by zenners. Many states use county to determine sales tax, my state for instance ONLY uses county to determine tax.

Unfortunately, adding it is not a simple process. It involves quite a bit of modification to the cart files and the database. Some people have chosen to use the zen cart suburb field for that purpose, which is why I have set up this mod to work with that field as well as the city and zip fields.

If you are interested in going that route then you might want to do some searching in the forums on counties, sales taxes, and the suburb field. As I said, its been under discussion for a long time so there is a lot of info out there to go over. I myself have chosen to use the zen cart zones to determine county.

For my part, adding a county field goes way beyond my skill level and free time. My hope is that the developers at some point will add built in support for counties, but needless to say they have a lot on their plates and I don't know where that need ranks in the over all scheme of things.

LadyHLG

I myself have chosen to use the zen cart zones to determine county.

So did you just set up every county in the state as a zone and then how did you link them together...through your mod and suburb search? I'm still really new to this and still trying to wrap my head around it all...the one problem with zip code ranges is some of the zips in a give range might fall into another county hence another tax and therefore might have the wrong tax applied to them.

Zidain~

Yes, I set up each county in the state as a zone, then set up zone taxes for each county. If you are only setting up county taxes that is all you have to do. You don't even need the mod, everything is handled by the existing zen cart zones set up.
If however, you need to apply additional taxes, say for specific cities then you can use this mod to add additional taxes to those county ones.

An Example (THIS IS ONLY AN EXAMPLE I MADE THE NUMBERS UP!)
You set up a zone sales tax for Orange County, CA of 7% using the zencart zones.
Then with the local sales tax mod set up an additional .5% sales tax to be applied to just the city of Santa Ana.

This would mean everyone in Orange County would pay 7% sales tax and everyone in the City of Santa Ana would pay an additional .5% sales tax.

Make sense?

LadyHLG

absolutely it does, I'm just wondering where zen cart pulls the county zone info from when comparing it from the customers data? Are there customer fields I need to enable in admin to capture county information and is there some verifier that auto checks the county field for errors (like say against zip code) mod that you know of.

The thing I'm concerned is when a customer comes in can they manipulate the data fields they are filling our, or simply make a mistake which causes a calculation error one way or another.

Humm, ok let me trying to explain this differently.
Instead of setting up the entire state of CA as a zone you would set up each county as a zone instead.
So for instance you would have CA - LA County, CA - Orange County, CA - Sacramento County etc.
So when someone from CA orders they have to select the county they are in, since it doesn't give them just CA as an option.
You then set up a zone tax for each county.
Is that any clearer?

LadyHLG

I think, let me build it out and if I need additional help I'll let you know...thanks Lady.

Coleby

So when someone from CA orders they have to select the county they are in, since it doesn't give them just CA as an option.

Where does it make them select a county?

Zidain

OK I'm soo lost. I set up a new Zone being the county itself (California - LA County) and when I set up a test account and created a profile which uses that as the address it breaks by UPS-XML mod. So at this point unless you have new ideas guys I'm just going to charge whatever the least sales tax is for CA, 7% or whatever and just pay the difference out of pocket...I wish Zen was more flexible but it appears I've hit the wall here.

Zidain

I've been testing my Zen Cart setup as a whole for the past week or so, in preparation for the new customers that I'll be getting from local sales events. So far this mod works great with "normal" payment modules. This might actually let me have an online store!

But things are not so good with Google Checkout. It still lists 0 tax, even when it correctly gets the shipping options. I'm not sure how their system pulls tax info from Zen Cart yet.

Thought you might like to know...

Thanks for the info, I have to admit I dont know much about the google checkout mod, I have looked at it a few times, but it seemed so buggy and the install was so far from straight forward that I didn't have the patience to try and install it(or read thru the massive thread on all the fixes). Also the last time I checked (and it has been a while and this may no longer be the case) google check out didn't pull any sales taxes from zen, they were all calculated on the google side. (Which is yet another reason I have not installed it.)
Is this no longer the case? Does the google checkout mod even work with zone taxes? If anyone out there can answer that question I would like to know.

LadyHLG

I'll look through the code and see if anything pops out at me. I know it's possible to send tax tables, it's right there in the XML API docs...

Just some initial digging... In GC mod's response handler (appropriately named responsehandler.php) there are several references to taxes. Examples:

$tax_amt = $data[$root]['order-adjustment']['total-tax']['VALUE'];
...
$order->info['tax'] = $tax_amt;

...where $root and $data come from parsed XML. There are also some lines about taxes in invoice generation parts of the same file, but I'm not entirely sure about them yet. I wonder if we can override the line that sets $tax_amt? The address details seem to be there too, according to nearby code.

I think the response handler takes care of the order after it has been processed by google and the customer is returning to the cart. Of course I could be completely wrong...:huh: