sales tax hierarchy in service management

SUGGESTED

Hello:

The help function in service management lists the sales tax hierarchy as being "product" first, and then "customer". We need this order to be reversed as we have several customers who are tax exempt on either of two taxes that might be charged for any given line item that is invoiced. For customers who are exempt on both taxes, we can set the customer to "non-taxable", and no taxes will be charged on a sale. For customers who pay only one of the taxes, we leave the customer status as taxable, and select the tax-group that applies for just that tax. Our experience in this latter instance, however, is that service management ignores this customer tax group in favour of the tax group(s) that exist for various "labour", "parts" and "miscellaneous" product line items that are invoiced. Thus, we have customers being charged for a given tax on various line items even though such customers have been set up to be exempt from such tax. Manual remediation through issuance of customer credits for wrongly charged tax is cumbersome, error-prone and generates a poor business image of us in the minds of our customers. Accordingly, this type of correction is far from optimal. Is custom programming a viable solution to this problem? Any suggestions regarding this, or other possible solutions, would be very much appreciated. Thank you.

  • 0

    Hello skmark, thank you for your question.

    Can you tell me what version of Service Management you are using?

    It sounds like on these particular customers you would not want the tax pulling from the product at all, is that correct?

    In a situation like this you may consider setting up separate products that have no tax on them to be defaults, this would allow you to skip that step of the hierarchy directly and go to the customer level. You would need to select the "no tax" version of the product on your entries in the future.

    Let me know if you think this would work for you or if you have any other questions?

  • 0 in reply to Kyle Archambeau

    Thanks Kyle. We are currently using version 9.7. To clarify, we are able to eliminate both taxes if we so desire by setting up the customer status as "non-taxable". Our trouble is in situations where we only want to charge one tax, or the other. We have tried your suggestion where we set up products that have two taxes, and other products that have just one tax. This works reasonably well for "parts", and "labor" products where two-tax products, and one-tax products can be assigned to respective call types. The desired call type, either for one of the taxes or for both taxes, can then be chosen when setting up a new work-order for a given customer. However, this does not work very well for "miscellaneous items". The reason is that taxation varies greatly amongst the items in this category; some items are assigned products that have both taxes while other items are assigned products that have just one of the taxes. Further, the products assigned to these "miscellaneous items" override the "miscellaneous" product that is assigned to a given call-type. Therefore, when setting up a new work-order, we can choose a call-type with products set up for just one of the taxes, but if we enter to that work-order a "miscellaneous item" that has assigned to it a product set up for both taxes then both taxes will, in fact, calculate on that "miscellaneous item" even though the "miscellaneous" product assigned to the call-type is set up for just one tax. It would be very awkward for us to use the "miscellaneous items" category where we had one set of such items for two-tax customers, and two other sets for each of the one-tax customers. Hopefully, there is some other way for us to resolve this issue. It would be handy to establish conditions in the tax-group setup, but this does not seem to be available. Thanks again.

  • 0 in reply to skmark
    SUGGESTED

    Thank you for the clarification skmark.

    At this point I think this would be best classified as an enhancement request. You can enter an enhancement request through the Help menu in Service Management.

    Help, Sage Timberline Office on the Web, Submit Enhancement Request.

    Here you will be able to tell our development group, in your own words, what you would like to see the software be able to do and why.

    As an alternative maybe someone else here on Sage City has encountered that issue? We'd love to hear from you if so and you've come up with a creative solution!