State Sales Tax

[lesliekirk]

Leslie, was not able to find any info on that, do you have a link?

Of course, I do: http://www.mvtrocks.com/p-TDATA-BASIC50.html

For what it's worth, I did contact them to point out we are now at version 9

[Krsullivan]

Hello Leslie,

Taxjar told me back in early December or late November that Emedia sales had begun development on a Taxjar module for miva. I have no idea if they were going to partner with another company to provide a complete solution. I don’t believe emedia is large enough to do it on their own. Taxjar just went through a 60 million dollar funding round. I could have sworn recently I saw a link or post somewhere that emedia sales had a taxjar as a monthly subscription. I assume for the module only, not the actual tax reporting. I would contact them directly to verify.

At that time, we had already started with a different miva developer for a taxjar module. We also had to find a solution for stone edge order manger. At that time Stone Edge was also developing a taxjar integration for their system, however they could not meet our deadline. So in December we went with plan “B”. Oh the horror.....Avalara....... Did I mention the 7 weeks we were with Avalara was the worst business relationship our company has ever experienced. It took, 5 weeks for Avalara to get a simple working sandbox. And once we did get the sandbox we found that they did not actually have a complete solution of stone edge. Don’t get me wrong, they were very responsive to my needs..... Until I signed the contact and paid them............. So, we left Avalara, and pushed on with Taxjar development. Fast responses, easy to understand documentation https://developers.taxjar.com/api/re.../#introduction, and they actually will work with you. We went live on Feb 1st in 42 states.......

To be fair Avalara is the largest player in this area and is a Certified Service Provider (CSP) for the streamlined Sales tax States (www.streamlinedsalestax.org). Meaning for those states there is NO charge it state filing or tax calls in those states. Taxjar is not a CSP and you will have to pay for those SST states. Yet, Taxjar’s cost is still cheaper both in api tax calls and filing state sales tax returns for you. Avalara does have a prebuilt miva module. It’s installed by Agentis Consulting, an Avalara’s contractor. It will take about a week to get that installed all the back and forth by email, as you must deal with two factor authentication, miva admin rights, FTP access, and getting credentials from Avalara. There is no documentation provided for the module, but it is a clean and easy to understand module. TaxJar, like many others currently do not yet have an integration for Miva. However, there will be several before the end of the year, possibly even from Miva itself.

One bit of caution though, Not all tax module will be the same. Calculating the sales tax calls or reporting tax collected is the easy part. The trick, is how will that module handle returns and cancellation? You just cannot void or adjust the transaction after the sale, you actually have to issue a separate tax credit to offset the tax charge. This is account 101. Now add purchases in one month at are returned in a different calendar month. The accounting involved can be over whelming for sure. If you only do a few transactions a day, you could do this manually in TaxJar, Avalara, or who ever else. If you have a lot of volume, you will need automation.. and you module must be capable.

Lets not forget wholesale (tax exempt sales). Keep track of exemption certificates..... Do it yourself, or have a service for it. Avalara offers this as an add on service, Taxjar refers you to a third party provider. We are going to do it ourselves.

Once you are set up and going, it should be fine with just a little extra work each month no matter who you go with.

Kevin,

[Brennan]

We (Miva) are building a native TaxJar integration for Miva. It will be launched at MivaCon (mid march). Shortly after that we will be building a brand new connector for Avalara to replace the existing one. Both modules will be build, maintained and supported by Miva.

[oliverands]

That's great news, Brennan.

[AaronM]

I downloaded the Miva TaxJar module to do some testing with and noticed that there is not any kind of address validation like with the AccurateTax module. Do you know if the TaxJar module attempts to match the street address behind the scenes somewhere or is it just calculating tax on the 7 digit zip code? Our warehouse, for example, is in a 6.25% zone but one block over (same city, state, and zip code) is 8.25% so you really need at least the Zip+4 I think.

I also noticed that if you mistype the zip code during checkout you get a nasty 'Miva fatal error' on the next screen. Is there a way to change that to a more customer friendly 'your zip code does not match your state' or something?

I really like the AccurateTax module but it does not always agree with the TaxJar module in Stone Edge when there is a state with weird issues. It would be nice if the imported taxes matched what SEOM calculated.

[alphabet]

Do you know if the TaxJar module attempts to match the street address behind the scenes somewhere or is it just calculating tax on the 7 digit zip code?

AaronM - Did you ever find the answer to this? I found this on TaxJar developer blog:

https://developers.taxjar.com/blog/a...s-and-plugins/

6.25% zone but one block over (same city, state, and zip code) is 8.25% so you really need at least the Zip+4 I think

You're right. I've sampled the Sales Tax Rate Tables and they are looking up on Zip+4. The old database saying is "Garbage In, Garbage Out", so without Zip+4 address validation any tax service responses are questionable.

I'm using Advanz Designs UPS Address Validation and it works fairly well for Zip+4 but I am looking for a module that uses the USPS API:

https://www.usps.com/business/web-to...mation-api.htm

Does anyone know of a module that does USPS API (free) address validation and saves the Plus 4 in an Order Custom field for sales tax rate table lookup?

[AaronM]

I did experiment with some test orders and found, as did you, that there is no validation going on. The tax rates that are returned by the TaxJar module are actually pretty useless in our case. We did a little tuning with the Accurate Tax module and it is working really well now so I'm happy. I'm not sure what service it uses for validation but it works well.

[afiumano]

Those of you using Taxjar - has the zip code issue been fixed? Is the module working well for you? Any issues? We have a client that needs to sign up for it and we want to make sure the module and service is sound.

[afiumano]

It almost sounds like we need an address verification module too to include the +4 digits on the zip codes - is that correct?

[netblazon]

I just saw this thread. The link is here:
http://taxdata.emediasales.com/

However, very few (if any!) states can have their sales tax calculated based on a 5-digit zipcode. A solution like this is not going to be accurate for many locations unless there's only a single rate per state, in which case you wouldn't need it because you could just use state based sales tax.

[wajake41]

I see this on the TaxJar SmartCalcs page:

"Accurate sales tax rates & calculations at the state, county city and special taxing district level." at

https://www.taxjar.com/smartcalcs/
Are Taxjar customers finding this to be true?
Hope so as we committed to them as of Oct 1.