[ic] admissions taxes based on item - not buyer

[Kevin Walsh]

"Glenn McCalley" <techlist at bnetmd.net> wrote:
> We need to charge an admissions tax on sales of tickets based upon the state 
> in which the -event- is located, NOT the state of the purchaser.  Needs to 
> be based on an item attribute like "tix_tax" ( a percentage) and calculated 
> on each item.  Can't apply to the total because an event in New Jersey has a 
> different tax rate than an event in New York, and there could be items other 
> than tickets in the order.
> 
> Looked at "Levies" and that seems to still work based on some constant that 
> applies to the whole order, not individual items.
> 
> I can show a total Admissions Tax for the entire order or show separate tax 
> items for each ticket, but it has to be based on the ticket not the 
> purchaser.
> 
> Any thoughts on how to do this other than Perl to cycle through "if item = 
> xxx" and check for a ticket?
> 
That's the way I'd probably do it.  I'd most likely create a UserTag
that loops through the cart and applies either an admissions tax or
a sales tax depending upon the current item in the loop.  The total tax
value would be returned for Interchange to use.

You'd presumably charge sales tax, rather than admissions tax, on
any shipping costs involved - or perhaps you hold tickets at the door,
rather than posting them at all.

Your shiny new UserTag could be used by creating a "salestax.asc" file
with one line, as follows:

    default [your-usertag-name]

See here for more tax-related information:

    http://www.interchange.rtfm.info/icdocs/Interchange_sales_tax_calculations.html

The only thing left to do is to work out how you want to look up the
sales and admission tax percentage values for each US location
(performance location for admissions and customer's location for other
sales), and code that into the UserTag.

I wouldn't store the percentages in item attributes, by the way;  I'd
store the performance location and code the UserTag to do the percentage
lookup.  That'd reduce the amount of maintenance required when the tax
rates change.  Whatever you do, make sure you do it securely - you don't
really want people to create their own item attributes and make up some
random sales tax amounts, do you?

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