Strange behaviour in automatic tax plugin

Resolved songdove
(@songdove)

3 years, 1 month ago

This was originally posted in the main woocommerce free support forum here on WP.org.

I had installed the automated tax plugin. My tests of the shopping cart revealed both PST and GST being tallied for my store. I needed to tell the automated system that I am selling books, and ensure the correct rates are being charged in provinces where the rules may be different.

I found this information to help me set it up manually: https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/businesses/topics/gst-hst-businesses/charge-collect-specific-situations/suppliers-publications.html

But the woocommerce tax area wouldn’t let me set it up. I disabled automated taxes, then went to the zero rated tab to enter the PST tax in and was told no matching tax rates. But when I went to the standard tax tab, there were two entries there from my testing with the automated tax plugin, and a strange entry in the row: Canada (spelled out, not the code) and in the tax columne: BC Tax. . . huh??? BC has PST and GST, we don’t have “BC Tax”. . .

According to the above link, I charge GST on book sales, but not PST. How on earth was I to set that up when Woocommerce thinks BC has some sort of BC Tax?!

I eventually solved this by only giving country code and province code. The automated system spelled out the country and province while manually, I have to use ONLY 2char codes.

I’ve left the automated tax plugin disabled and manually entered in all the provinces and territories and my tax is calculating properly now. But just putting this here so hopefully a dev sees it and checks what they are inputting for Canadian taxes.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

Plugin Support tijosh a11n
(@tijosh)

3 years, 1 month ago

Hi there @songdove,

The WooCommerce Tax extension relies on an external tax rating service to calculate taxes at checkout. Because stores in Canada have varying tax responsibilities, our tax calculation partner is investigating ways to improve cross-province tax handling.

Currently, that tax rating service API returns the PST and the GST for all provinces in Canada other than Quebec. The “BC” tax you saw would have been the PST for British Columbia.

If your store needs to handle that situation differently, we suggest deactivating Automated Taxes at WooCommerce > Settings > Tax and adding all tax rates manually following our guide. It sounds like you’ve already done this, but I hope this clears up what’s happening behind the scenes.

Thread Starter songdove
(@songdove)

3 years, 1 month ago

That’s weird, especially seeing both the country and the province spelled out. Initially that royally threw me for a loop as I tried to copy what the automated system had done only to be told no rates matched. Eventually I decided to ignore the way the automated system displayed the info and go with the instructions (they don’t match), and I could manually set up my taxes for Canadian provinces.

But now to hear that whatever your third party service is calling BC tax, is our PST. . . I guess you don’t get many Canadian users, because this should seriously be changed to actually say PST. We have two taxes in this province, not one. Some provinces only have one, so mistakenly referring to them as ON tax for example, would sort of work because ON only has HST, but it’s still not accurate.

Please speak with your external tax rating service about their presentation of Canadian taxes. While I fixed my issue by doing it manually, if Woocommerce is going to offer an automated method, it has to be more accurately presented. Accountants up here will look just as confused as I was and demand clarity if they are shown what your automated system showed me.

Otherwise, I’ll mark this as resolved. . . as misrepresented as it is. . .
kellymetal a11n
(@kellymetal)

3 years ago
Hi there,

That’s weird, especially seeing both the country and the province spelled out.

From your first message, you are referring to the Standard Tax table under WooCommerce > Settings > Taxes, correct? On my site I’m not seeing the same thing where they are spelled out — the tax rates coming back from the extension are just the codes like shown here:

Link to image: https://d.pr/i/6LApmZ

In your case, those columns contain the full Country and Province spelled out? Please send over screenshots of what you are seeing there. I recommend https://snipboard.io for easily sharing screenshots – please follow the instructions on the page, then paste the URL in your reply here.

Regarding the “Tax name” column, I understand how that would be confusing instead of showing the specific “PST”, “HST”, etc if that’s what was expected. I believe the reason it’s displayed like that is because the automated taxes override the “Itemized tax” setting and only display a single tax. Checking the logs for the taxes when I try with a Quebec address, I see it returns all of the different rates from the TaxJar service, and then a combined rate which is what is then stored in the tax table:
```
03-26-2021 @ 11:43:36 - Received: {"tax":{"amount_to_collect":17.28,"breakdown":{"combined_tax_rate":0.12,"gst":7.2,"gst_tax_rate":0.05,"gst_taxable_amount":144.0,"line_items":[{"combined_tax_rate":0.12,"gst":5.0,"gst_tax_rate":0.05,"gst_taxable_amount":100.0,"id":"45671-573e95cb51192a5b66878b38e275efea","pst":7.0,"pst_tax_rate":0.07,"pst_taxable_amount":100.0,"qst":0.0,"qst_tax_rate":0.0,"qst_taxable_amount":0.0,"tax_collectable":12.0,"taxable_amount":100.0}],"pst":10.08,"pst_tax_rate":0.07,"pst_taxable_amount":144.0,"qst":0.0,"qst_tax_rate":0.0,"qst_taxable_amount" [...]
```
For a more powerful/flexible automated taxes solution, we also have a standalone TaxJar extension available here:
https://woocommerce.com/products/taxjar/
Thread Starter songdove
(@songdove)

3 years ago

Asking for a screenshot AFTER I disabled the plugin and deleted the information is a little late in the game. But yes, the country and province were spelled out. I am not the one coding woocommerce either. The people you need to be talking to regarding how information is displayed are the woocommerce developers AND Taxjar. Taxjar needs to be told that tax information must be presented in a way bookkeepers and accountants will recognize, and “BC Tax” is not a valid tax entry!

But I’m not re-enabling the plugin to recreate the tests for the sake of a screenshot. I have my site working the way I need it to manually now.

Plugin Support Grigorij S. a11n
(@grigaswp)

3 years ago

Hi @songdove,

Taxjar needs to be told that tax information must be presented in a way bookkeepers and accountants will recognize, and “BC Tax” is not a valid tax entry!

I see that this behaviour is already reported in this bug report:

What the TaxJar API should be doing is adding 2 tax rates to each Province, with the correct GST and PST for each

It sounds like this should be enough for our developers, however, if you see any missing information – please add it in a comment or let us know here.

But I’m not re-enabling the plugin to recreate the tests for the sake of a screenshot. I have my site working the way I need it to manually now.

That makes sense and it sounds like we have all the information we need here.

It’s hard to say how long will it take for our developers to address this and indeed, switching automatic calculation off is the only workaround for now.

I hope this helps and and have a wonderful day ahead!

Thread Starter songdove
(@songdove)

3 years ago

Thanks. It appears I’m the latest person to find the issue since 2017. I added the spelled out country/province name problem that I was seeing. Otherwise, thanks for adding this discussion to that thread over there. I’m surprised it hasn’t been fixed since then though when they knew about this 5 years ago. . .