The place I started was at the California Board of Equalization website. They have a list of rates available in Excel that include City, County, and Tax Rate. Note they don't include a zip code in their list.



This list is somewhat useful, but it doesn't include all city abbreviations or alternate spellings so using it alone is obviously not going to work. Also, here is a direct quote from the BOE web site:





This brings about the question - How is it possible to charge the correct tax in California if you only know the address?


I also looked into Avalara Tax. However, their prices are pretty high and get a lot higher when you do more transactions in a year.



Lastly, I found this web site that has the data available including zip codes for a $79/year subscription. Here is the link: http://www.onlineimage.biz/text/order_taxtable.html. I also found another one for slightly more and they have a live data feed if you want to do some custom coding in BVC: <SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt; COLOR: #1f497d; FONT-FAMILY: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-themecolor: dark2; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA">http://www.zip2tax.com/z2t_services.asp



However, before I go off and buy a subscription service that I have no idea how accurate the information is or whether the company will be around for very long, I wanted to post this question to the community. After all, everyone selling taxable items in California has to pay the same rates (aside from the items with special tax classes), so why does every business have to reinvent the wheel to pay them?



My question is directed to those doing business in California - where do you get your tax rate information from and how often do you update it?



And if you are using BVC 5, specifically how did you implement these rates? Note the OR clause in the lookup will apply multiple rates by default in a straight zip code/tax rate table, and zip code isn't enough information to apply the correct tax in California.

My question is - how? It sounds like the taxes in NY are similar to CA. The problem lies in BVC's default way of selecting from the table. Some cities have multiple zip codes and some zip codes have multiple city names (some "official", and some not). Some of these cities charge a local tax and may not be included in the entire zip code, so zip code alone is not enough information to charge sales tax in CA.


If I made a cross-reference list between zip code and city and merged it with the information from the CA BOE, I would have a somewhat correct way of doing it, however the logic within BVC 5 doesn't seem like it will handle a list like that, being that the state, city, county, and zip code are ORed together and ALL of these taxes will be applied.



For example, the zip code 90001 has 2 potential city names, Firestone Park and Los Angeles. If I populate the BVC table with only city and zip code along with the appropriate rate, I would have many records with a city name "Los Angeles" and 2 records with zip code 90001. So if a customer entered "Los Angeles" and "90001", BVC will fetch all records with either city name "Los Angeles" OR zip code "90001" and then apply the taxes for ALL of those records - this is certainly not what I want to happen.



Now if you compound this with the issue that there are many USPS approved and preferred city names for a specific zip code (some of which are city abbveviations), there are even more records to deal with. For example, "West Los Angeles" could be abbreviated to "WLA" by the customer, which is perfectly acceptable as far as USPS is concerned.



If I were to change the stored procedure to use an "AND" instead of an "OR" between City and Zip, there would be issues if a particular city name was not matched correctly in the database - ideally, I would like it to default to a particular city in the zip code if the exact one wasn't matched, but that requires a lot of custom logic programmed into the core of BVC.



By the way, I noticed there is a county field in the database, but I haven't found a way to enable it so the customer can see it - it isn't on the addresses page under options. How do I turn it on? Without changing any code, is it possible to have it only appear if "California" is selected as the state?

Ok, so it sounds like he is losing money on every transaction and eating the difference..? The state of California rate is 8.25%, and then there are county taxes up to 1% depending on the county, then on top of that there are city and district taxes that are usually a fraction of a percent. The taxes in some areas are close to 10%.


While I don't think there are any specific rules about under charging, over charging a customer can lead to complaints and possibly fines. You are also required to remit everything that is collected whether your calculation was correct or not.



I am hoping for someone who has set up their table with the latest rates to post it on the forum and save me the work :). Tab delimited format will do.



Anyway, looking at the state documentation and the way the database is set up I think I could put the information in by state, county, and then city and it would cover more than 99% of the rules. There are only a few dozen city and district taxes to mess with and the actual amounts are so small that if we didn't collect it it would not be the end of the world.



However, how do I turn on the county field?? That would go a long way toward solving this issue.

Yes, I noticed that you said that. I was referring to the fact that the rate varies by as much as 2% and charging a flat rate probably means he is losing up to 2% on some transactions and nothing on others.

I couldn't find anything on the BOE web site that you are required to collect the correct amount (but I am sure they would have a problem with charging the customer more than what is required), just that you are required to pay them the correct amount.

Upon Careful review of the California BOE rules and regulations my accountant determined that I only need to charge my local sales tax. If you do not operate in a tax jurisdiction you do not have to collect their tax. The rules state that if you deliver or make sales calls into an are you must collect the appropriate tax if not your location is considered the address of transaction. Much like when you go to dinner in Placer county you do not have to pay San Diego Counties tax rate :)



I hope this helps, Joe