eCommerce : Working with the improved taxation engine : Comments

RE: Working with the improved taxation engine

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 09:02:04 GMT

I just re-worded the above a little to be clear that existing sites you will need to activate this.

Why?

Because it gives you/ your clients the chance to finishing processing exting orders on finialised orders at the old values or backup existing orders for your book keeping with those old values to keep your accountants and the Tax man happy.

RE: Working with the improved taxation engine

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:01:23 GMT

Found a bit of a flaw with all this

In an example where you want to have your product value with Tax show as 79.00 and you have a tax value of 15% I am sure the new tax rounding stuff in the system would work.

BUT

To get a value of 79.00 with a tax rate of %15.00 you will need to set a value of 68.696

Now I am sure the tax stuff would work well now to round correctly now to get 79.00 BUT

The admin on the product field does its own rounding to two decimal places.

So if you enter into your product vlaue field 68.696 the admin rounds it to 69.00

So before you get to do the calculations your on a 2 decimal place and thus can not achieve the correct price including tax.

So this is a problem and fields in the admin where this will apply need to handle more decimal places.

RE: Working with the improved taxation engine

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 02:55:47 GMT

Hi Liam,

Can you just clarify this a little more for me. I would like to switch this on one of my client sites. But am concerned about what it will effect.

Does this mean if I enable this now it will change past order totals? Once they are placed - whether payment is pending or not the amount shouldn't change? We use eft and offline processing as well as paypal.

I'm confused by this bit...

finishing processing exting orders on finialised orders at the old values or backup existing orders for your book keeping with those old values to keep your accountants and the Tax man happy.

RE: Working with the improved taxation engine

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 03:19:35 GMT

Pretty straight forward, It is something not considered.

You have 15% tax.

You select tax for a product on the price section.

You want the product to have a total value including tax of $79.00

To ge tthat you need to Have a value of 68.696. If you enter that into the price field it will round up that value so it is incorect. This is an Admin issue rather then the new tax feature. Was just not updated.

Right now you only get a total value of 79.01 or 78.99. The first value being 1 cent over if you make claims to be 79.00 then of course your over charging.

RE: Working with the improved taxation engine

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 03:24:08 GMT

Thanks Liam. But I am actually referring to your first comment - about processing and backing up existing orders etc - before switching this on?

RE: Working with the improved taxation engine

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 03:41:27 GMT

All that is was the post Daniel made was not worded quite right to make it clear. I can edit the forums as I helped set these up so I just edited it.

Why is the turn on feature implemented?

Because when you turn it on all values for orders through the system will be effected. IF this was on by default values would change, current processed orders could have values changed etc.

Being an option you turn on allows you/your client to be able to finish new orders, export their order data etc as records.

Some big orders etc and lots of orders, especially in a B to B scenario would have different data values. Especially if these were regular large recuring orders.

While a great improvement and one long overdue you want to be able to have records of the old values for the tax man and the accountants keeping the books for a business.

RE: Working with the improved taxation engine

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 06:31:49 GMT

I was just saying to a client the other day who wanted to use GST inclusive pricing that BC was looking into it, so I was excited to see this. Unfortunately it's not working very well for rounded tax-inclusive figures as you've pointed out Liam. Thanks for pointing that out before I ticked anything on our client's site!

Great to see things are happening, but would love to see this oversight fixed up

RE: Working with the improved taxation engine

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 09:38:05 GMT

Hi guys,

The admin rounding to 2 decimals is just a UI "feature".

If you enter $79.00 as product price WITH tax (i.e., tax inclusive), then yes, in the UI you will see $68.70 as product price without tax, but we will actually store $79.00 / 1.15 = $68.695652 in the database (6 decimals).

Therefore - if you want the total price to be $79, you can just enter $79 in the "Total Price" box.

Now, if you then go to the product price WITHOUT tax (i.e., "Unit Price") and enter a value there, then this gets interpreted as tax exclusive.

Tax exclusive prices should only be entered with 2 decimals - so if you enter, $68.70 as "Unit Price", then this results in $68.70 * 1.15 = $79.005 (stored in the database), which in the UI gets rounded to $79.01.

Cheers,

Paul.

RE: Working with the improved taxation engine

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 10:42:42 GMT

Hi Paul, that is no good.
If have have a tax code applied to your product and put 79.00 as the sell price of the product then the tax value will go up.
If like most of our clients do, they want tax, they want to run the tax feature of BC to properly apply and when time to change, change one thing to change all etc they want to enter the correct exlusion tax. This also applies so you can properly output the prices excluding tax on the acutal websites as well. Especially for example if someone views outside of the site origin country they can see the prices excluding tax. Which is pretty much wanted by default by our clients even if they are not selling abroad they want people to see that.

The $79.01 that shows has nothing to do with the UI, it is the value rendered by the tag.
If someone wants to render correct pricing in BC, even if the system rounding works better as it looks to which is awesome, this can not kick in because the Admin UI does its own thing before that value goes in to be a factor and incorectly rounds values to 2 decimal places meaning our clients can never properly get their values right.

Like others I am sure will start posting as well, one of the big things people wanted to have is not just for invoices etc to work but the ability to actually get the prices they want. The amount of posts I can picture in my head over the years on forums about 1 cent off top or bottom on product prices which people hated and want fixed is a long one.

We sent one of our big clients the rounding info, spoke on the phone and they hoped they could fix this. When we found we could not, they basically asked us what was the point of all the other stuff so everything else is pretty useless to them as the original prices they setup are not as they want them in the first place.

RE: Working with the improved taxation engine

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 10:43:08 GMT

As I side note other eCommerce systems allow you to properly tax product prices to get the right values.

RE: Working with the improved taxation engine

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 15:25:07 GMT

Hi Liam,

Let me first make sure I understand your need: You want to add a new product (in the e-commerce section, not in a specific order), for which the Unit Price + Tax = $79.00 (i.e., in a Tax Inclusive way).

With product prices having only 2 decimals, that's not mathematically possible:

* If the Unit Price is $68.69, then the Total Price is $68.69 * 1.15 = $78.9935 => $78.99

* If the Unit Price is $68.70, then the Total Price is $68.70 * 1.15 = $79.005 => $79.01.

So, if my understanding is right, you want to be able to either:

(1) Specify new product prices in a Tax Inclusive fashion in the e-commerce area of the site (instead of the current way, which is Tax Exclusive)

(2) Specify new product prices with 4 decimals instead of 2 (e.g., be able to set the product price to $68.6957).

This was not part of our taxation engine fixes, but IS part of our roadmap - with a rather low priority as of right now, but that can change of course.

Note that you CAN add a new Tax Inclusive product with the price $79.00 when editing an Order from Admin. I am aware that this is not your primary workflow though.

Please let me know if my understanding is correct.

Cheers, and many thanks for the feedback,

Paul..

RE: Working with the improved taxation engine

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 22:29:27 GMT

Hi Paul, for the first part that is right.

It is not possible with 2 decimal places but for all our clients and for others I have seen over the years that want to have the inal price set to a rounded value of say $79.00 just as their rivals can, just as they see in stores and shops can, as they have found in other eCommerce sollutions can. When you tell them you can not in BC and the new updates still do not allow that - They do not feel warm and fuzzy about BC.

My thought with the update was that the decimal places element would also be a feature in the admin. If you choose to allow 3/4 decimal places then the fields in the admin should allow that.

How does running the API and the spreadsheet import currently work, you rounding those by only 2 decimal places as well?

I do not know about others but in terms of the taxation fixes the actual correct prices including tax was one of the primary things wanted by our larger eCommerce clients. One of them yesterday told me while they Appreciate the information to them the Taxation stuff if it did not allow correct prices when tax is included then it was pretty pointless and he was quite cross, that in his eyes time was wasted on this that did not fix his issues with the tax and other issues like the stock bugs or math calculation bugs, or incorect invoice pricing or incorect math on shipping dimension etc.

Was quite sturn about it.

The whole implementation in BC with the ability to set tax, allow cross country tax to effect the tax prices across is there but you keep mentioning to do it manually and have the price there.

In some cases we have to do that for some clients and they basically doing both stock re-maangement AND pricing calculations And if they could shipping to via 3rd party applications because BC does not do it properly.

And I know other partners run their own API systems that have correction logic to sort and make sure BC is not scewing up.

To be quite frank while the taxation system fix is great, LONG over due and I respect the complex nature due to the way it was built was not easy to fix and when you try other things break etc BUT BC especially in eCommerce is not doing the basics, not even working due to bugs in several areas

I mean, I can download free online eCommerce things, put one plugin in wordpress that manages the above issue fine, all works. I downloaded a free POS thing to try out for some ideas looking at and double checked this yesterday - can get the $79.00 when system adding 15% tax - all fine.

"Roadmap", "Next year" etc can not really be used for excuses much longer, especially when your told bugs wont get fixed any time soon. It is pretty hard to take sometimes despite loving the overall.

For us this was basic stuff, being able to have a correctly rounded value with tax. Not being able to do that then all the other tax rounded corrections are really a latter thing, if the product price is not right in the first place then you got to see how that makes sense.

If something is wrong to begin with, spending a load of time making sure other things all play nice after the fact is not really effective.

RE: Working with the improved taxation engine

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 03:28:24 GMT

I have to support Liam on this issue. I just finished spending an hour or so playing with the new tax feature and noticed the same issue. I cannot get a $5 item to show as $5 on the shop including a 10% tax. This is as Liam said due to it being rounded to 2 decimal places instead of 4. I even tried importing the amount as 4 places, but the system just rounds it to 2 and then displays the price as $5.01. This is exactly what all the complaints have been about. I'm not sure what you were fixing but my understanding of all the forum posts over the years was exactly that. Our clients want to show the correct pricing on their online shops, not up or down 1cent.

RE: Working with the improved taxation engine

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 15:46:14 GMT

Hi guys,

I am really sorry for that. Our focus was first put on building the engine right (i.e., the backend calculations), leaving the actual feature improvements for later (there are in fact several such workflows which need to be improved).

And yes, unfortunately, you also get rounded to 2 decimals if you import product prices via the API.

We will try to prioritize this improvement/fix over others.

Paul.

RE: Working with the improved taxation engine

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 01:34:33 GMT

This is just a basic feature of being able to use 3-4 decimal places to get the correct price including tax to show. Does anyone have an update of the progress of this feature? Is it going to happen?

Cheers

Stewart

RE: Working with the improved taxation engine

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Sat, 30 Nov 2013 02:53:04 GMT

Hi Paul,

We are trying to get the pricing to show as $9.95 including GST and it's not possible either. This product is advertised at $9.95 too so it's really annoying that we can't make it exactly $9.95!

It's now almost 8 months later... has there been any improvement on this?

Thank you