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Allow for US Based Taxes based on Counties

  • aironz shared this idea 11 years ago
  • Payments/Billing
  • 35 Comments


46 Votes
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In the United States for the State of Ohio our tax rates are based on each county in the state. Allow WHMCS to setup tax rates based on zip codes in addition to State based tax rate.

Featured Comment

WHMCS commented 16th November 15
We are curious to hear the community's thoughts on how this could be implemented - as you many know, county and city tax rules can complicate the tax calculation of an order exponentially. Some of the replies in this feature request allude to how this feature could be added, or make mention of how easy it would be to add this functionality of the process, but I can't say that we are convinced.

WHMCS would like to implement a solution that would help solve this need, but we need some more feedback/ideas from the community.

36 Comments

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Frank Feingold commented 1st December 15
I concur with Mr. Weiding. In the US (Wisconsin in particular) we need to know what country the person lives in in order to charge sales tax correctly. Here is the sales tax table for Wisconsin: https://www.revenue.wi.gov/faqs/pcs/taxrates.html#txrate4 As Mr. Weiding points out you can not use zip code to determine country.

We also need each and every item on on an invoice (hosting, domains, add-on's, billable items) to allow us to mark them as taxable or non-taxable. A lot of the states are getting 'creative' on what they now consider taxable, so we have to be able to mark things as they now define them.
Larry Weidig commented 1st December 15
For Wisconsin we have county based tax. This could be implemented as simply as adding a county field to the billing record (zip code does NOT define county) and then creating an additional tax level on that. I would think though expanding the taxation system to allow taxing on ANY field in the billing record and then referencing that against a lookup table for that field to determine the tax rules (percent, amount, ...) would be the route to go. This could end this issue once and for all and not have it pop up in the future.


We continue to look back tat this product every couple of month's but until this item can be addressed we just move on for us. Would be happy to provide any additional information in regards to our needs if needed.
Official Response
WHMCS commented 16th November 15
We are curious to hear the community's thoughts on how this could be implemented - as you many know, county and city tax rules can complicate the tax calculation of an order exponentially. Some of the replies in this feature request allude to how this feature could be added, or make mention of how easy it would be to add this functionality of the process, but I can't say that we are convinced.

WHMCS would like to implement a solution that would help solve this need, but we need some more feedback/ideas from the community.
Travis Taylor commented 30th July 15
This idea is over 2 years old and has had no progress. We need this and I imagine it would be relatively simple to add. We could fix it with a 3rd tax option that allows you to specify the zip code.
Ravi Majithia commented 25th July 14
My client asked for the same feature and i have no addon to implement this, so i have to develop my own addon for implementation. That's same that WHMCS don't support zip code wise tax rules although they are saying we have very flexible module tax module.
randal k commented 20th June 14
Also very interested in either going back to a field or adding in another level for taxes. Very frustrating :/
Keefe John commented 28th May 14
When will we see this feature?
Larry Weidig commented 7th April 14
Yes, I can see the frustration there. This is definitely a deal breaker option for us and there has been NO progress.
Mark Stephenson commented 8th February 14
Version 5.3.3 has made this more of a problem because they added a drop down menu for client State entry and that State field sets the sales tax. In prior versions we could enter the County and State in the text field and we could set different tax rates for different counties. It all worked. Now with version 5.3.3, the field is a drop down so we can't manually enter the county and state -- very frustrating. I have a ticket in requesting a trick to not lose our ability to charge county-based sales tax caused by version 5.3.3.
Daniel Thomas commented 17th July 13
IMHO if you are running that many clients then you should have an accountant handling sales tax for you before the chance of an audit. I am for the feature being added as I live in a state in which has county and city taxes but am also running WHMCS alongside Quickbooks with an accountant verifying everything.
ahobach commented 17th July 13
Daniel Thomas wrote:While WHMCS does not support this does not mean it can't be used in conjunction with true accounting software. Just means that services in your state can't be invoiced automatically until the sales tax is calculated and manually added to the invoice.
I guess this is why the Feature request was opened. Having to manually calculate taxes and add them in leads to errors. Why not simply expand WHMCS to account for all the various types of taxes in todays world.

Many of us have already found alternate ways to handle taxes but like your comment they are not the best way to do it. This leads to issues when you have 10, 20, 30K worth the customers and you get audited for sales tax. Not a fun situation to be in.
Daniel Thomas commented 17th July 13
While WHMCS does not support this does not mean it can't be used in conjunction with true accounting software. Just means that services in your state can't be invoiced automatically until the sales tax is calculated and manually added to the invoice.
ahobach commented 30th May 13
Larry Weidig wrote:Wisconsin as well has county based taxes. We cannot consider this software as an option which is disappointing until this can be addressed. Please let us know if this happens so we can look at it again.
We are from Wisconsin too. We sell alot of different hosting services, website design, software licenses, colocation and hardware to customers. Charging taxes via WHMCS is difficult and requires alot of work arounds. I agree with the statement that we need county based taxes along with the ability to tag services/billable items to be taxed or not, the ability to add line item taxes in like the stadium tax and have the line item taxes show on the customers PDF invoice. We will then also need a way to generate a report on the taxes charged/collected so we can pay the government.

Not to mention taxes for services like VOIP which has a few different taxes that need to be charged.
Bill Bartlow commented 31st January 13
Washington state has city by city sales tax on top of the state wide tax. The state publishes the tax rates by zip code in a downloadable format. WHMCS should be able to match on that zip code to apply the correct tax. This is a very needed feature in states where sales tax is collected on goods and services.
Larry Weidig commented 30th January 13
Wisconsin as well has county based taxes. We cannot consider this software as an option which is disappointing until this can be addressed. Please let us know if this happens so we can look at it again.