VAT exemptions

[chiggs2]

I need to exempt some orders from charging VAT. I can do this with V3 as I have a mod to handle it. I would like to upgrade this store to V5 but can't as the VAT mod is really needed. Has anyone else come across this problem with V5? Does anyone know a solution?

[bsmither]

Welcome chiggs2! Glad to see you made it to the forums.

Is it that the order is exempt from the tax, or the specific product(s), or the customer?

If the customer, then I think there may be a way to assign customers to a tax-exempt customer group. (I'll have to verify that.)

If products, you can assign the product to a tax-exempt tax class.

[chiggs2]

Thanks for the reply. It is the customer that I need to exempt. If they are registered for VAT in their own country I have to exempt them from paying VAT here in the UK on any orders that they make.

I have had a look and it is possible to group customers but I can't see any settings that will allow me to exempt them from paying VAT.

If you know how I could do that it would be very helpful.

[bsmither]

I'll be working on this for C514. Hopefully it isn't already a feature in CC515 (you haven't mentioned what version you are running).

But because this isn't a minor tweak to existing code, we need to take this over to the third-party forum: www.cubecartforums.org.

[bsmither]

Quick question: How many products are in your store? The reason I ask is that there may be an existing way to do this:

Create a Customer Group. Call it "Tax-Exempt".

Bring up a product for editing - probably a product that a tax-exempt customer would buy. On the Pricing tab, you should now see a drop-down selector just under the word Pricing. Choose Tax-Exempt. In the Tax Class drop-down selector, choose Tax Exempt. Click save.

If you have a dummy customer for experiments, add that customer to the Tax-Exempt group.

Make a purchase and see what happens.

The problem here is that there is no easy way to update all the products to have a membership in the Tax-Exempt customer group. So if you have a lot of products that a tax-exempt customer is permitted to buy tax-free, then there will be a lot of work ahead.

[chiggs2]

Thank you. I can see how that could possibly be a solution. There are several thousand products in the store so to set these up manually would be a lot of work. I will play about with a dummy installation and see if I can find where the data is stored in the database then I may be able to run a query to update all the products.

[chiggs2]

I have tried setting up the categories but it still adds the VAT to the order. A decent shipping mod and a VAT mod should be standard kit on Cubecart by now. There must have been many requests for these features in the past. Most B to B websites that trade with the EU will need to exempt customers from VAT, Magento and Open Cart have this facility.The mod works great on V3, been using it for several years now yet it is still not built in to V5.

[bsmither]

This is strange. I was experimenting with the code, and the results showed the tax-exempt customer purchasing a product with a tax-exempt price schedule, and the VAT tax still made its appearance. This was a last week.

But now, it seems to work. My tax-exempt customer has items in the basket and there's no tax.

I wonder what I did to cause that?

[chiggs2]

Yes, very strange. I will have another look at it. If it works then it should solve the problem. Thanks for the post.

[bsmither]

Experiments show this to be repeatable:

A Customer in a Group adds a Product in the same Group to the cart. The taxes on that Product should reflect the Tax Class assigned to that Group. (It's actually somewhat different, but this explanation will suffice.)

For example, John, a VAT-Exempt deaf customer buys a book on sign-language. The book is also a member of a pricing group that has 0% VAT.

When John puts that book in his cart, the cart should show 0.00 as the tax on this order. But it shows a value 20% of the price. This is wrong.

To fix, in /classes/catalogue.class.php, find the getProductPrice() function (probably near line 577 in CC514 and line 586 in CC515).

Then find $product_data['sale_price'] = $pricing_group[0]['sale_price'];

After that line add this on a new line:

$product_data['tax_type'] = $pricing_group[0]['tax_type']; // Bug #468

This hasn't been extensively tested to see what else, if anything else, gets unsorted.