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Comment by monksy | Hacker News Reader

For the love of god don't forget taxes.. fucking taxes.

Federal, state, local, type, etc.

I hope your taxes system has a concept of only applying to certain item groups and/or certain specific items. Some places have food taxed, others do not, water isn't taxed, alcohol is taxed differently, food with enough sugar is taxed differently than just "food", and the list goes on.

Also your clients might want to be able to add their own "taxes" (aka service charges) for certain days/weeks of the year or by the channel that the order was placed.

POS system are incredibly complicated and even more-so if they span multiple restaurant industries or types. Think table service vs drive thru vs carryout vs curbside and things like pizza vs coffee. A lot of what you build will not transfer over. Your logic to handle half and half pizza probably isn't going to be reusable in other industries.

I will say one thing, it's never dull.

Delivery is taxed if the food is taxed...in most jurisdictions. You could easily have any variation apply in edge cases. Your software has to do it all.

I'm building an online ordering system right now. Just for pizzerias. Generalized systems suck hard.

Your coffee in a café in Germany is taxed differently based on the amount and type of milk in your coffee. Oh and of course the tax rate is different depending on whether you consume it in the café or take it to go.

I seriously thought you had to be joking. But no! Ok I figure, the carbon footprint of milk is massive[0], it must be taxed at a higher rate?

> In some European countries, plant-based milk is subjected to a significantly higher VAT than cow’s milk.

Still haven't understood this one yet though. Some kind of protectionist tax rate for the farmers?

[0](https://www.co2everything.com/co2e-of/milk)

This is 100% normal and happens in America. It's a huge reason why hard seltzers took off. (They're brewed instead of distilled)

On top of this, you can have local based taxes or tax breaks. (I.e. Chicago has a bag tax, leave the city.. no bag tax)

https://www.efile.com/unusual-strange-funny-taxes-throughout...

On the other hand, here in the US, I can walk into one location of a store, and tax is X. I walk 3 blocks to another location, and tax is Y.

That's because one is juuuuuust (like 100ft) outside the city limit and county vs city tax is different.

Service charge isn't a tax. It's the POS's flexbility with autograting.

It maybe considered to be taxable.

I include that mostly under integrations. These days most companies are smart enough to use a centralized service instead of rate tables. The services are pretty good and provide pre-built integrations for most common frameworks. A security audit, install, and QA and you're 90% done.

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