CA Tax?

[scdwebmaster]

We are required to collect tax for the various counties in California. Unfortunately, the tax information provided by the state is for city and county only not zip code. They apparently frown upon using zip code as a taxing zone.

Has anyone attempted to crack this nut? If so, can you give me some pointers as to how it can be done?

Thanks in advance,
J. Smith

[Logan Rhodehamel]

I fear that as tax laws become increasingly varied and complex, we are more often going to refer merchants to third party tax calculators. We had CertiTAX and CyberSource in our 5.5 version. They are notably lacking from 7.0, and I would like to see them return.

At checkout, we aren't currently collecting county. It's simple enough to add a field and request it, and a bit more work to let it have impact on tax calculations. But then we are reliant on the customer to provide accurate information. What if they lie? We could build in some address lookup tools - but then what we are doing is recreating all the work that has been done (probably better) by companies like CCH.

I was just reading about new Washington laws, businesses based here seem to have a similar problem on the horizon. Tax compliance is a difficult (and ever more pressing) issue.

[WylieE]

I fear that as tax laws become increasingly varied and complex, we are more often going to refer merchants to third party tax calculators. We had CertiTAX and CyberSource in our 5.5 version. They are notably lacking from 7.0, and I would like to see them return.

I was just reading about new Washington laws, businesses based here seem to have a similar problem on the horizon. Tax compliance is a difficult (and ever more pressing) issue.

As a WA based business, we are already dealing with the new, complex tax laws. We must now track sales tax by a combination of street address, city and zipcode. Taxes must be reported by location code, of which there are thousands in the state. Fortunately, WA state has some decent lookup tools that can be used.

[scdwebmaster]

One more related question:

Do I need the API source code in order to be able to add a field to the tax table and track taxes by county?

[jrobgood]

We are required to collect tax for the various counties in California. Unfortunately, the tax information provided by the state is for city and county only not zip code. They apparently frown upon using zip code as a taxing zone.

Has anyone attempted to crack this nut? If so, can you give me some pointers as to how it can be done?

Thanks in advance,
J. Smith

Couple options.

1 - Use a third-party service like CCH or Avalara - expensive but worth it.

2 - Use Google Maps to geocode the address and grab the municipality and county from their XML response, then match that in a table that you've populated with your state's tax tables - free but requires constant maintenance and updates of the tax table.

-Rob.

[Logan Rhodehamel]

1 - Use a third-party service like CCH or Avalara - expensive but worth it.

I would like to see our CCH and CyberSource integrations be produced for the 7.0 application (currently 5.5 only). I looked at CCH pricing the other day and it seemed reasonable, considering the complexity of the task.

And didn't you post an Avalara integration for 7.0?

[jrobgood]

And didn't you post an Avalara integration for 7.0?

Yeesh... we tried to... it's done busted right now since migrating to Final from RC2

As soon as we figure out what the heck changed in CB I will re-post the solution.

-Rob.