Originally Posted by madRiver
Originally Posted by rubberchicken
I worked on a bunch of retail and ecommerce sites that used external "sales and use" tax. Much of my info is a bit out of date, but sales and use tax in the USA is a shambles of different, contradictory and hard to understand laws. Most bigger users do not even bother to maintain their own sales tax software- rather they buy a tax package (Vertex and Taxware are the big players) and do the call-out to the tax engine with line items, location etc., and let them figure it out. Updates happen a minimum of every 30 days, sometimes more frequently if a jurisdiction has a urgent update. Unlike payroll withholding which gets fixed or averaged out over the year, companies might get penalized by underreporting and underpaying sales tax. This is one area where I sympathize with retailers because managing sales tax collection is a headache, a burden and costly.
I can't remember name of startup but they built the backend service to handle the tax collection, payments, amounts for companies and states down to city level. The company value exploded when internet sales tax went thru. If you own an ecommerce site happy integrating that service. Rolling your own is possible however you likely need a paid service to subscribe to for live updates of what rates are.
It would be a very tall order to roll your own tax engine, but a lot of software supports 3 methods: input the tax tables by a batch process, input the tax tables line by line interactively, or a software call to the tax engine which has its own rate update process.. I bet somebody (probably both Vertex and Taxware) has done it purely as a web service call, but that requires you to rely on both the internet link and their software to properly calculate the sales tax. Huge ERP and eCommerce packages have built in hooks into the popular tax software. As for the company that made it big when internet sales took off ? It was probably either Vertex or Taxware. They also maintain payroll tax software with API's the same way.
Originally Posted by rubberchicken
I worked on a bunch of retail and ecommerce sites that used external "sales and use" tax. Much of my info is a bit out of date, but sales and use tax in the USA is a shambles of different, contradictory and hard to understand laws. Most bigger users do not even bother to maintain their own sales tax software- rather they buy a tax package (Vertex and Taxware are the big players) and do the call-out to the tax engine with line items, location etc., and let them figure it out. Updates happen a minimum of every 30 days, sometimes more frequently if a jurisdiction has a urgent update. Unlike payroll withholding which gets fixed or averaged out over the year, companies might get penalized by underreporting and underpaying sales tax. This is one area where I sympathize with retailers because managing sales tax collection is a headache, a burden and costly.
I can't remember name of startup but they built the backend service to handle the tax collection, payments, amounts for companies and states down to city level. The company value exploded when internet sales tax went thru. If you own an ecommerce site happy integrating that service. Rolling your own is possible however you likely need a paid service to subscribe to for live updates of what rates are.
It would be a very tall order to roll your own tax engine, but a lot of software supports 3 methods: input the tax tables by a batch process, input the tax tables line by line interactively, or a software call to the tax engine which has its own rate update process.. I bet somebody (probably both Vertex and Taxware) has done it purely as a web service call, but that requires you to rely on both the internet link and their software to properly calculate the sales tax. Huge ERP and eCommerce packages have built in hooks into the popular tax software. As for the company that made it big when internet sales took off ? It was probably either Vertex or Taxware. They also maintain payroll tax software with API's the same way.
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