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Comment by badcppdev | Hacker News Reader

The Tax Solution page doesn't make it clear as to whether it handles US State Sales Tax problems?

> The Tax Solution page doesn't make it clear as to whether it handles US State Sales Tax problems?

I will fix that. It handles US State Sales Tax to some extent. So it has state tax rules and thresholds. So will only apply the tax if the threshold or there is a nexus. However, it doesn't have the polygon tax areas that would be needed for cities. For example, Illinois doesn't have SaaS tax but Chicago does. That is very high on my list of things to do. But you could work around that right now by doing it on a customer level. Where you set the tax rate for the customer.

But I will definitely improve that text on the tax page to explain how it hands the US tax issues.

Do you know any resource on us state sales tax ? From software development pov. From invoicing rules to tax collection, reporting and allied stuff.

Or for that matter, sales tax/ vat of countries ? I suppose there should be

I had to do a ton of googling. It's super super hard. There are various websites that have a collection and then you need other sites for other collections.

Any pointers ?

https://www.avalara.com/vatlive/en/country-guides/south-amer... is one of them.

Ugh...the tax shit in the US is so annoying. At least your e-commerce system is meant for a single kind of transaction, I worked on a more multi-purpose system (that was also open-sourced! https://github.com/workarea-commerce/workarea) that handled everything from physical items to buy online pickup in store to digital items to subscriptions. It was a LOT of work getting that tax system in order! We usually recommended our clients work with a company like Avalara or TaxJar (which is now just Stripe) so they wouldn't need to take on the burden of taxes, but a lot of folks didn't and just used our stuff. It got confusing lol...

While I'm aiming at just one market. The tax system supports having multiple. You can define products as physical or not. Define which tax type it is and then define the tax rules per country for that tax rule.

I'm going to be adding integrations with tax jar to help make it easier for keeping tax rules up to date. Do a daily/weekly check for tax in each area and then save it.

How do ppl currently handle it in big systems like oracle/dynamics or whatever.

Integrate with Avalara or TaxJar

Avatax is amazing

Sales tax in the US is exceedingly complex. It's simply out of scope for most companies to tackle without using a specialized sales tax vendor. To properly create a model of just US states' rules, you need to take into account dozens of factors like product type, exemptions, various address types, fulfillment info, and more.

You can get to a basic level of compliance fairly easily with state- and customer-based rates in select circumstances. But unless you dig deep, you will get things wrong, and you will only know about it when you get a potentially expensive audit years later.

Context: CTO of [Taxwire](https://taxwire.co), writing software for sales tax.

I ask you too.

Is there a us sales tax software development documentation somewhere ?

We are looking to expand an open source accounting software into usa but without sales tax, it wont be usable for businesses I suppose.

Yeah there's a lot of nuance state-to-state, like Illinois charging for certain digital services.

It's worse than that, it can also vary by city.

It can even vary within the city—in Chicago there's an extra tax on the F&B industry to support Navy Pier, with very specific boundaries.

Once I was long-distance cycling in the USA during the summer, and rather fond of chocolate shakes. Somewhere at a fast food place, I got asked if I was eating in or taking out. I asked what the difference was—it seemed incongruous to ask on such an item when that’s the entirety of the order. My curiosity was rewarded: apparently there was an extra tax in that city on one or the other; so I did whichever was cheaper (and honestly, either drinking it inside, or sitting on my trike).

I even came across taxes that were only present in half a city, even—one side of a road but not the other, that kind of thing.

That's probably not uncommon since municipality borders don't follow county borders.

It can even vary within a city, and within a zip code - see TID's, NID's, and CID's.

It's even worse than that. You need a complete address to actually know what the correct tax is.

I miss the good ole days when Boomer politicians didn't realize you could buy things on the internet (or that it even existed) and everything was without sales tax.

That was the reason they retaliated with hate probably

So, let's look at what actually happened. Boomer Bill Clinton signed the Internet Tax Freedom Act into law in 1998, prohibiting taxation of internet sales to support the growth of commerce on the internet (which itself was invented by Boomers and even older generations).

Much much later there were efforts to tax sales on the internet no matter where in the US, and for good reasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Tax_Freedom_Act

>Much much later there were efforts to tax sales on the internet no matter where in the US, and for good reasons.

The Wayfair Decision in 2018

Seems like it was both enacted and neutered by Boomers and even older generations.

Concurring justices:

- Justice Anthony Kennedy - Silent Generation (born 1936)

- Justice Clarence Thomas - Baby Boomer Generation (born 1948)

- Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg - Silent Generation (born 1933)

- Justice Samuel Alito - Baby Boomer Generation (born 1950)

- Justice Neil Gorsuch - Generation X (born 1967)

Appointing presidents:

- Ronald Reagan (Justice Anthony Kennedy) - Greatest Generation (born 1911)

- George H. W. Bush (Justice Clarence Thomas) - Greatest Generation (born 1924)

- Bill Clinton (Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg) - Baby Boomer Generation (born 1946)

- George W. Bush (Justice Samuel Alito) - Baby Boomer Generation (born 1946)

- Donald Trump (Justice Neil Gorsuch) - Baby Boomer Generation (born 1946)

> Ronald Reagan (Justice Anthony Kennedy)

> George H. W. Bush (Justice Clarence Thomas)

> Bill Clinton (Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg)

What's up with repeating the word "Justice" so much? Shouldn't you be writing "President of the United States Ronald Reagan, Leader of the Free World (Justice Anthony Kennedy)", etc?

>like Illinois charging for certain digital services

I live in IL and haven't heard of that. Generally if something is a 'sale' it's taxed though. I miss the old days when anything purchased online was some gray area they couldn't figure out if they should tax or not.

I think it's specifically Chicago:

>Chicago’s 9% amusement tax extends to all “amusements that are delivered electronically.” If you stay home and watch a movie, you pay the same tax rate as you would if seeing it in theaters.

https://www.illinoispolicy.org/this-christmas-your-gift-from...

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