To use prices inc VAT in a store, you have to using shipping origin as a tax calculation method, but then johnny foreigner (and people in the Channel Islands) end up paying VAT, plus you end up out of pocket on tax on flat rate shipping as that isn’t included in tax calculations.
Tax calculations based on shipping address would seem to be the correct choice, but then Magento expects you to enter prices without VAT.
No, it’s still wrong. Flat rate shipping is calculated incorrectly and it still makes people outside of the country pay VAT. If you’re a company that is VAT registered, it’s just not workable. You’d have to do all your invoicing again and work out the VAT correctly picking out the non-EU invoices and fudging the shipping VAT.
It’s also a bit of a pain in the butt having to set up a B2B store for those customers when it could have more easily been done using a customer group that showed prices ex-vat for that group of customers. I’m pretty sure it used to allow that pre-1.0 but I may be mistaken.
Currently I have set up a store that uses the VAT inclusive price as the main price for all products. Since the site is only targeted at UK customers this seems to work fine (no tax calculations done by Magento). Obviously, if they decide to sell overseas this will be a problem.
I have spoken to someone at Google Checkout UK, and they say that Magento does not calculate VAT properly - it also passes on “tax” value to GC, instead of “VAT”. I was also told that if you are not VAT registered, that this is not a big deal at this stage, but if you do become VAT registered, this might be a huge problem.
That is - if you can get GC to work with Magento at all....
I have spoken to someone at Google Checkout UK, and they say that Magento does not calculate VAT properly - it also passes on “tax” value to GC, instead of “VAT”.
Lisa
Lisa - can you be more specific on ‘does not calculate vat properly?
We are not seeing VAT calculation issues anywhere and have had our accounts team cross check everything with VAT.
We are using VAT inclusive prices in the store but vat is displayed on checkout and in invoices etc and it appears to be correct.
Shipping is shown as a VAT exclusive price in the shipping panel of the checkout but VAT is added in the order totals and VAT brekdown - again all VAT calculations are appearing to be correct.
We used fixed rate shipping.
It would be good to know if the calaculations are incorrect in any way and what Googles feedback was specifically on this. We are not using google checkout on magento based stores as yet, but we have our dev team looking to set it up in the next few weeks as we use it on most of our other stores (non magento)
I will also contact our google account rep to see if he can shed any light on the issues.
As we are not VAT registered at this point, this was not relevant to us, so I did not go much into it with the Google Checkout guy.
What he said was basically that, as Magento passes on TAX value instead of VAT to GC cart, you should ensure that all VAT calculations are done properly and check them in both Magento and Google Checkout.
Your Google account rep will probably be of more help - but just double-check everything first.
As for Google Checkout, I am currently working with a team member from Varien, Serge, on fixing this, as there have been problems with Magento not passing on shipping charges to GC. Stay tuned!
As we are not VAT registered at this point, this was not relevant to us, so I did not go much into it with the Google Checkout guy.
What he said was basically that, as Magento passes on TAX value instead of VAT to GC cart, you should ensure that all VAT calculations are done properly and check them in both Magento and Google Checkout.
Your Google account rep will probably be of more help - but just double-check everything first.
As for Google Checkout, I am currently working with a team member from Varien, Serge, on fixing this, as there have been problems with Magento not passing on shipping charges to GC. Stay tuned!
We are not seeing VAT calculation issues anywhere and have had our accounts team cross check everything with VAT.
We are using VAT inclusive prices in the store but vat is displayed on checkout and in invoices etc and it appears to be correct.
Shipping is shown as a VAT exclusive price in the shipping panel of the checkout but VAT is added in the order totals and VAT brekdown - again all VAT calculations are appearing to be correct.
I detailed the calculation and why it was wrong in this bug report - http://www.magentocommerce.com/bug-tracking/issue?issue=1802
I detailed the calculation and why it was wrong in this bug report - http://www.magentocommerce.com/bug-tracking/issue?issue=1802
we have set shipping to be a VAT exclusive price in admin (but taxable) and the checkout calculations are working ok - they are exact to the penny.
admittedly we have a very simple shipping system - one flat rate across all products and we only ship to the UK on the stores we are currently testing magento on.
When I follow the instructions to set VAT included in the price, it all seems to work ok excpet it outputs the wrong tax rate?!?! I have tax set up for UK as 17.5, but if I add a £1 product the tax keeps getting set to 15p and the product 85p… Cannot find what it is doing, but it completely renders the site that I have built useless until this is fixed.
When I follow the instructions to set VAT included in the price, it all seems to work ok excpet it outputs the wrong tax rate?!?! I have tax set up for UK as 17.5, but if I add a £1 product the tax keeps getting set to 15p and the product 85p… Cannot find what it is doing, but it completely renders the site that I have built useless until this is fixed.
that is exactly correct - A £1 product incl VAT - is £0.85 excl VAT (rounded)
When I follow the instructions to set VAT included in the price, it all seems to work ok excpet it outputs the wrong tax rate?!?! I have tax set up for UK as 17.5, but if I add a £1 product the tax keeps getting set to 15p and the product 85p… Cannot find what it is doing, but it completely renders the site that I have built useless until this is fixed.
