Taxing the taxes

[bos]

I started using Cubecart some years ago, but I never became good friend with the tax system so it applies to my shop exactly how I want it. Trial and error during long periods showed me that the system is really simple; all costs entered are without VAT. But what I want is that all costs entered should be including VAT, and that in the summary the VAT should be shown as a value /of/ the total, not adding to the tutorial.

Someone suggested to use a tax extension from Noodleman that would let me do what I want, but alas: that extension (as well as a lot of others) uses an apache extension called ionCube, which has been and is UNavailable on all the three web hostings I've tried, and it's not installable per user. So, I was at a loss.

The workaround for my problem was to let Cubecart ignore anything that had to do with taxes, make enter all costs as including VAT. Then, in the order summary, I manually calculated the tax (total value * 0.2) and entered in the tax field. That way everything was correct and exactly how I wanted it. Total sum including tax, and the tax value being the tax value /only/, without adding or substracting itself to anything.

The backside of this approach is that it's been tedious work as my shop has grown bigger. So after 1 year of manually adding the taxes I took a dive into the source code to see if I could make some patch (for my own use only).

 

I ended up changing this file:

admin/sources/orders.index.inc.php: (add near line 425)

$overview_summary['total_tax'] =  Tax::getInstance()->priceFormat($overview_summary['total'] * 0.2);

This made Cubecart automatically fill the taxes box in the summary page for the order, without touching anything else. However, this had a side effect: in the print out, the tax field was not in the same format as the other monetary values. Instead of "123.00kr" it would be "123". No decimals and no currency.

A quick and ugly "solution" to this was changing the template:

admin/sources/orders.index.inc.php: (near line 219)

<!-- div class="total">{$tax.name} <strong>{$tax.value}</strong></div -->
<div class="total">{$tax.name} <strong>{$order.total * 0.2}kr</strong></div > <!-- bos 2019-12-31, auto tax -->

This works, sort of, if the currency is SEK (kr, kronor). Rounding errors can occur, leading to "123.4567kr" and so forth, and it will be totally bogus when a customer uses another currency. I did however not find a way to make an inline PHP-call to number_format(), or to Cubecart's internal currency/number-function (which I do not remember the name of at this time), but all in all these small changes saves me tons of work by not having to enter the tax sum manually.

 

(NB: Should this post be in the wrong forum I will humbly apologize. I picked it since it was the one that best fit the description)

 

 

EDIT: Typo

[bsmither]

"ionCube, which has been and is available on all the three web hostings I've tried, is not installable per user."

Can we explore this a bit more?

[bos]

That was a typo. It should have been UNavailable (I have edited the post).

 

The web hosters I've been using are One.com (current), Loopia (previous), and Crystone (former). None of them supports or allows ionCube.

[bsmither]

Note: initial research suggests that One.com is running PHP environments in a "safe" mode - which disallows user-loaded extensions, among other restrictions.