two points:
1) the states are changing from nexus to point of delivery.
from Washington State page
Effective July 1, 2008, sales tax collection is based on the location
where the customer receives the merchandise or service. For retailers
that ship or deliver their products this is a change in how sales tax is
determined.
2) he asked a very specific question about Taxware for 9.04.
no one by me replied.
I did a google and searched my emails from 2003 to present.
I did not find any documentation about the someone actually using Taxware.
David E Jones sent the following on 7/7/2010 9:06 AM:
I'm not sure what it means to you that only BJ responded to your question, but
if you'd like to clarify I imagine someone will comment.
TaxWare has been supported for a long time, but it is not used very often
because it is an expensive system and there are many alternatives. These days
most people using OFBiz get tax data from their accountant or from a
subscription service and then put that into the OFBiz TaxAuthority tables, or
they use an online service instead of something complex and messy like TaxWare
that requires time-sensitive data updates on a regular basis.
This is extremely complex stuff (and looks like it will be getting worse!), so count on
this requiring some expense and effort. In the past, for the USA anyway (it's different
for each country), a company only had to charge taxes for states, counties, and cities
where they have a "nexus". Because of that we have to support a crazy variety
of tax laws, but individual companies usually only need tax data for a few different tax
authorities. If this law passes (depending on the details) that could change a lot.
Is OFBiz ready? Sure. OFBiz has been doing tax stuff for about 8 years now.
This isn't likely to be a whole lot different than anything done in the past,
but it will increase the expense and complexity for users of the system to
either maintain far more tax data, force subscribing to a service, or use of
one of the many complete sales tax services (like TaxWare).
How does everyone feel now about the opportunity to work part-time for a few or
perhaps hundreds of government bodies as a tax collector? Sales tax calc
companies might be a good thing to invest in, and online retailers might want
to not only get calc services but also make sure they have indemnification
guarantees for when it's wrong.
-David
BTW, if you really want a question answered the mailing lists are a good start
but consider this: if you aren't willing to do the research to get an answer to
your own question, why would you expect someone else to do it for you?
On Jul 7, 2010, at 8:30 AM, Mike Z wrote:
I came across this news article this morning, and I immediately
thought of my previous question were I asked about the "TaxWare"
status of ofbiz. It was also noteworthy (to me) that only BJ
responded to my inquiry.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20009603-38.html
So: Is ofbiz ready for the inevitable? Eventually, we'll be required
to collect sales tax (and report) on a nation-wide basis for all
ecommercce transactions. How will this possibly work?
