Vat For Retail

[wesleythorne]

Vat for retail, actinic has said they are working on this but I think this should be a top priority.
All prices the customer see include vat but the customer must be shielded from the word VAT, in the checkout it would be nice to have an option to show vat included in total price.
The merchant needs a vat break down for sage quickbboks etc.
retail customers do not like VAT added and they get confused about it.

More deciaml points for vat

wesley

[Mike Hughes]

Just to add some more details:

For consumer retail:

- Prices shown should include VAT.
- VAT is supposed to be calculated once per customer unit (i.e. on each item or pack of items the customer can buy) and then multiplied per number of items purchased. Not calculated on the ex-vat total for multiple units as this means you can end up overcharging the customer (the way it's done today, BAD, BAD, BAD).
- Shipping charges displayed need to include VAT as well. (Currently BAD).
- Checkout/cart/receipts need to display the product unit price and total including VAT. VAT should then be shown once only as the total for the order.
- The whole idea is not confuse the customer by showing them one price when they decide to buy and then another price once they've clicked the buy now button.

I would also like to see the option for business purchasers to tick a box in which case an alternative receipt layout is used. In this case the Business receipt layout should be used where VAT is shown separately for each line item as well as the total. You'll need this anyway for B2B retailers so it's just a case of specifiying which report should be used.

Mike

[oldhasbeen]

Why this hasn't been sorted before is beyond me as it's been complained about repeatedly for years.

As a VAT registered consumer site, you should still input prices net for your VAT reports (with a min. 3 decimal places for VAT as standard). If Actinic can add this up to show the retail price against the product, why can't it continue this process in basket/check out?

At the moment we have to custom VAT every single product because of the decimal place problem and Actinic still does not add up properly all the time when customers buy multiples of a single product (and if you get lots of those on one sale, it multiplies the problem accordingly ).

We use flat rate shipping and have to set this up with no VAT on actinic and do the split on importing the orders to our accounts for VAT reporting. Flat rate of £2.95 does not look good when it shows to the consumer as £2.51 - you then get complaints of overcharging, which you are not.

You also get consumers quoting the net prices on their email order confirmations and thinking you're overcharging for products (doesn't always gel that the total on our accounts generated "correctly formatted for UK retail sales" receipt is still the same total as the "confusing and badly formatted Actinic order receipt"). This is not condusive to building trust nor reputation, and quite frankly we should not have to tolerate it considering Actinic have known about this problem for so long.

Consumers do not understand VAT - they don't need to - and for UK consumer sites to be forced into all this "creative accounting" to keep both consumer and VAT man in abeyance is utterly appalling.

My 2p worth (again!). Regards - Helen

[Darren B]

I have to agree

I am lucky enough for our main site i is not used to process the orders, merely collect all the details, we then manualy put these on our main system and the VAT rounding drives you mad when it is pennys out.

The three decimal places would sort most of the rounding problems out, why actinic insist on doing everything to 2 is beyond me, fine show this in the web and reciepts but a little more work in the back ground would be good

Just my bid for an improvement

Darren

[cdicken]

Hi guys

Many thanks for taking the time to post all this. Tax is very much at the forefront of our minds at the moment so this input is very useful.

Mike - it is possible to change the tax rounding rules to calculate on each item and then round the tax - rather than doing it on the whole order. It's in the order rounding rules in 'Business Settings | Tax'.

Anyway, I have emailed all the development team leaders and asked them to take a look at what you have written here.

[Mike Hughes]

Thanks Chris,

I had my tax settings to 'Round Line Scientific' and hadn't realised that 'Round Item Scientific' would calculate VAT per item rather than per Line. I've now changed it.

Mike

[remmo]

Just adding my voice here:

I'd like to see tax inclusive prices carried over into the shopping cart, with a seperate line showing the total tax included in the total order amount.

ie.
Item A $10.00
Item B $50.00

Total $60.00
This order includes $5.45 GST

[cdicken]

Thanks for this Remmo - I have passed it onto the development team.

[Duncan Allan]

Adding my voice to this thread as these are primary features that should have been addressed in the latest release of V8.

3 decimal places very necessary and a focus on retail environments so that we can enter tax inclusive prices into the product item and not have to work backwards. A simple check box retail or b2b would be great switching between the two.

Duncan

[rmorrow]

Just to clarify Mike's suggestion:

- Shipping charges displayed need to include VAT as well. (Currently BAD).

It is also very important that the VAT inclusive shipping charge displayed is consistent, regardless of the cart contents and their respective VAT rates. So when a retailer states the delivery charge as, for example, £5, it is always charged to the retail customer at £5 inc VAT.
Examples:
Cart contents
Product 1 £11.75 (inc VAT @ 17.5%)
Shipping £5 (inc pro-rata VAT)
Should give shipping break down of ex VAT £4.255, VAT £0.745

Cart contents
Product 1 £11.75 (inc VAT @ 17.5%)
Product 2 £10 (zero rated)
Shipping £5 (inc pro-rata VAT)
Should give shipping break down of ex VAT £4.627, VAT £0.372 (half of first example)

Cart contents
Product 2 £10 (zero rated)
Shipping £5 (inc pro-rata VAT)
Should give shipping break down of ex VAT £5 VAT £0

Maybe this has already been mentioned somewhere else, but I just wanted to be sure!
Richard.

[cdicken]

Thanks for the clarification Richard - I have passed this on to the development team.

[OriginalTouch]

Can I just clarify - is there at the moment, any way at all of including tax/VAT in the cart prices rather than showing the net prices???
(This thread was started quite a while ago and there may have been updates since then)

[cdicken]

There's no way to do it at the moment, but Chris Barling has promised publicly elsewhere on this forum that this will be available in the next release.

[Dman]

I'd like to add my pleading voice to this one...

I have been running an Actinic shop since 2003 and I can't tell you how many times customers have decided to 're-order' and send me a cheque based on the ex vat prices (another time-wasting thing to chase up), or query the prices they see in the checkout and in doing so hesitate and sometimes fail to buy. Also I have problems caused by the fact that the 'receipts' (NOT invoices for goodness sakes) show ex vat line item pricing so people call up to order and quote the ex vat prices from their last receipt and then ask me "how come all the prices have gone up..?"

This kind of thing is usually an unneccesary embarrassment for us and them (we don't like explaining things like this and the customer then feeling they have been a bit of a dummy) and it simply doesn't suit the primary purpose of most shops - which is to retail to the public.

Please finally change this aspect of the site to make things simpler for the consumer to spend their money! :-)

[Mike Hughes]

Hi Damian,

Check out the V9 beta where this is pretty much fixed.

Mike

PS. You can change 'Invoice' on the printout to say 'Receipt' by changing the text within actinic.