Ubercart

Nice.

I have a client in NY who has this problem.... but they sell clothing. Clothing in NY is taxed differently (4% I think?)

But they also sell things that are not clothing. It's a huge headache.

Did you post it? I am interested.

Same here any updates on this?

that would be great!

I hope integrators readers will see this as the business explanation that it is intended to be!

Calculating the sales tax rate for the many counties and districts in NY is technically possible.

You will need a locations based model as tax jurisdictions are not based on zip codes - they overlap physical boundaries, and there are often multiple jurisdictions for a single address. You will also need to understand the different products and how each jurisdiction taxes them. A shirt can be a tax exempt item at one price point in one jurisdiction ( for a winter month) while another shirt at a different price, different jurisdiction, and different time, could have a luxury tax on top of usual taxes.

But, the real issue is not calculating the rates - it is keeping up with the legislative boundary changes, the products that are moved in and out of tax groups, and the dates for which tax breaks are given - thinking of back to school tax holidays - on go back to school dates - or need to stimulate the economy dates.

There is also a commercial cloud service that have this all solved - company called Avalara

We at DrupalSalesTax.com - http://drupalsalestax.com - have worked with Avalara to have them understand the open source requirements for our smaller eCommerce sites, but for them to update us on the compliance complexities for larger sites who have accountants and public reporting to think about.

We have built a module - free and open source - to connect to the Avatax service. It does require use of a commercial php library, which supplies the encryption for the SOAP service - the server is sending the delivery address and transaction details over the wire - secure encrypted is essential.

Calculating the rate (amount of tax) is the smallest part of the requirement - although it is the one we see most of - accountants have to deal with the end of month reconciliations to their SAP order entry systems (or Sage accounts) - answer questions to internal auditors on questions like the audit trail - liability to the state for sales taxes collected and not paid over etc etc.

If your site is a start up, in a single state like Nevada - the sales tax module that comes with Ubercart is all you require - but if your client is a large public company with Nexus in many states, and growing - please do not leave the sales tax portion of your project to the last moment. Ubercart is now a main stream cart - but as part of this there are issues to be managed regarding sales tax - not in all states - but in NY, CA, TX, WA to name a few.

I hope that the community will try to understand the business issues faced by accountants when evaluating sales tax collection and compliance.

These include audit, compliance, accounting standards, integration with the ERP and order processing systems, exemption certificate management, filing, participation in national sales tax programs (refer Amazon and it settlement with the Sate of CA re affiliates in CA) - a long long list of stuff.