Commerce need to allow multiple tax rates on a product.

[EricGagne]

Hello,

In Canada we pay a 5% tax on goods and services all accross Canada.  Some provinces also have their own tax which is usually included in a harmonized tax that is collected by said province and is charged as one tax.   Unfortunately, in Quebec the taxes are not harmonized in this way and they have to appear separately in the invoice.



Examples:

Alberta: Only the federal 5% tax needs to be charged because this province does not have provincial sales tax so the taxes on the invoice appears as "GST: 5%"

Ontario: On top of the federal tax, this province has its own 8% tax but as it is "harmonized", Ontario businesses charge 13% and it shows on the invoice as "HST: 13%"

Quebec: As previously said, Quebec also has its own sales tax but it is not harmonized, it is a 9.975% tax (please don't ask why not 10%, nobody knows except the idiots who made that decision) that is collected separately from the federal tax and the invoices needs to show two taxes as:
GST: 5%
QST: 9.975%

And this is where Commerce comes short, we can configure as many tax rates as we need but we can only assign one to a product.   We need to be apply to apply multiple tax rates on a product.  I can harly believe that Quebec is the only place in the world (or even North-America) where there is more than 1 level of sales tax.

[EricGagne]

And tax rates also need to support more than 2 decimals.  If everyting I posted above was supported, I still would not be able to use the tax system in Commerce because it would be illegal for me to charge 9.98% when the rate is 9.975%

[EricGagne]

I have been thinking about this overnight and I may have an easy solution.
 

First thing, regardless of anything else.  I think we should be able to enter a description for each tax rate.   In many countries a business cannot simply print the word "Tax" with a dollar amount, it is often required by law to print the actual tax name and rate.   Ideally we would be able to do this per language.
 

Now here's what I suggest.

The "Name" field in the "Settings" tab should never appear on the invoice, it would only be used inside commerce.  The invoice would print the individual rate "codes", rate and amount. 

On the first screen, we'd have the tax Code and rate but we'd also have the "Use detail rates only" option which would allow us to leave the code and rate blank on this screen.  But in this example, I have set it so I would charge the 5% TPS/GST to everyone.  If there was nothing defined in the "Rates" tab than this would be the only tax on the invoice and it would print as TPS/GST (5%) with the tax amount beside ide.

 

 

If the first screen is set as above and the "Rates" screen is set as follow, then both taxes should be calculated and appear separately on the invoice.  In this example, if the sales amount was 100$, I should see.

Sales Amount: $100.00
TPS/GST (5%): $5.00
TVQ/QST (9.9975%): $9.98 
Invoice Total: $114.98

Obviously, the TVQ/QST is rounded amount

 

Although the above demonstrates how I think the rate Settings tab and Rates tab should work, this configuration would not be good for someone in Canada because, as I said in my previous post, some provinces have Harmonized Sales Tax with is the TSP/GST rate + their own rate.  For example, Ontario has a 8% rate so the HST in this province is 13%.  

Because of this, I would have to create rules for each province by specifying "Use detail rates only" on the Settings tab (which would allow me to leave the fields empty) and set everything in the "Rates" tab.

 

Example 1:  For Ontario, I would configure it like this and the invoice would only show "HST (13%)" with the amount.

 

For Quebec, because I have to show taxes separately, I would configure it this way.

The Settings tab would be set empty like above but the "Rates" tab would have two rates for Quebec. Note that this means that Commerce would have to use all the rates that match the ship to, currently if we set to entries for the same destination in the "Rates" tab, only the first one is used.

 

Obviously I may be wrong but this does not look to me as it would be very complicated to change and I believe it would cover the needs of everyone, everywhere.