Problems with vat inclusive prices!!

[russell king]

Hi

We have bought Actinic Business and are jsut finishing off our site..

All the products (canvas art prints) we will be selling are available in a range of sizes. Each size is a different price.
We have setup Actinic to have a main product with size set as an attribute, and each size set as a choice. Then the price for each size is set within the options permutations.

Our problem is this...
Our prices for our main product are £65, £89, £125, £159, £239
These are vat inclusive prices.
However no matter which 'tax rounding' options we use we can not enter a vat exclusive price that will give us these prices??!!

Eg - £89 inc vat - we can only get £88.99 or £89.01.

We see this as a major flaw in Actinic, as these are not 'odd' prices, they are common round numbers.
We have spent a lot of money on supporting marketing materials with these prices already printed so changing them is not an option.
Is there a workaround to this bug?
This is currently preventing us from going live....

thanks in advance for any help

[jont]

This is a well known issue with Actinic (and other software to be fair) due to the way it rounds the calculations - alas Actinic will only take 2 decimal places which is often not enough to get a nice round number

[jont]

Under View | Business Settings | Tax | Advanced there is a drop down box for Tax Rounding with varoius options ... never tried this yet but may be worth experimenting to see if it gets closer to the desired figures you need

HTH

[Mike Hughes]

You can enter 'custom' vat levels against prices. So work out the ex-vat price and then add the correct custom VAT level to bring it up to the correct price.

Sadly Actinic seems unwilling to fix this.

Mike

[russell king]

Mike
This sounds like my answer - how exactly do I do this??
thanks

Russell

[russell king]

All

Thanks for your help and suggestions. I have also had the following reply from Actinic support...

"I am afraid the closed work around is to using the rounding as you have suggested. But you can also create addition tax rule for different rounding methods and associate the one that suite for each product in the Product details tab(this could be a bit tedious as you might have to do this for each product)."

Now Im new to Actinic, but surely this sort of 'bug' (as thats what I believe it is) is unacceptable in software costing £700+ ?

We use Sage Line 50 here, and it has no problem handling VAT rounding. Nor has any other financial software I have ever used. The workarounds suggested here will add a lot of extra time setting up and maintaining our store.

Surely Actinic should log this problem as a bug and address it? If not they should clearly state in their sales literature that there are some VAT pricing issues...

Your thoughts?

regards

Russell King

[Bruce]

You must set the 'Tax Treatment' in the 'Details' tab of the product to 'Custom' and then set the exact amount of tax to be added to the product in the 'Custom Tax' field. You will then have to go to Design | Text | ID 219 and change this prompt to: (Including VAT @ 17.5%)

This will solve the rounding problems.

Kind regards,

[jont]

Not really a bug as such but could be overcome with the option to enter VAT inclusive prices against the product and have Actinic remove the VAT element internally - this may cause issues with shipping to VAT exempt countries or the ex-VAT figure being slightly different to the back-office figure

[russell king]

Still will not work ....

Bruce/Jont

Your suggested fix doesn't work.
Remember I'm not using prices from the product (see my original post above) but specifying individual prices for each size (option) in the permutations tab.
If i select custom as tax type i do not get anywhere to add a tax element manually on the permutations tab?! (only on the product price tab)

This is now causing us a serious problem, we've spent hours trying every different way to get around this and just can't. If we select one type of vat rounding we can get some prices to work, but not all. We can't add vat manually either it seems. We also considered removing vat altogether and processing it only on our accounts side. But as we plan to sell overseas (USA etc) this would mess up our tax exempt buyers...

We are now stuck. It appears our only option is to try and re-price our products so that they work. This will cost us deae, as we've just had a lot of flyers printed with the prices on at a cost of over £600.

As it stands though £600 is less tham cost of alternative software and the weeks of labour spent building the site in Actinic..

Anyone have a workable solution to this problem??

thanks

Russell

[wjcampbe]

If your permutations are tied to hidden products, and the price and custom VAT handling is set on the original hidden product, does this not carry through correctly?

[jont]

Indeed if the product is set to that of the component. All components that are replicated throughout a site should ideally be added in as hidden products (wherever possible) as it makes maintaining the site a whole lot easier in changing just the 1 price location

[L'il Suzie]

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Our problem is this...
Our prices for our main product are £65, £89, £125, £159, £239
These are vat inclusive prices.
However no matter which 'tax rounding' options we use we can not enter a vat exclusive price that will give us these prices??!!

Following on from this question, but in the same vein, what calculation should I be using in Excel to get a VAT exclusive price? The instructions on the Actinic Knowledge Database suggests that I should just divide my original amount by 1.175...

So: if I take a vat-inclusive price of £2.45, and divide it, I get £2.00.

But: if you add VAT onto £2.00, you get £2.35!

All the goods on my site were initially entered as VAT inclusive, and following some excellent training recently, I now have to change the prices to be VAT exclusive...

Suggestions please...!

[wjcampbe]

I get 2.45 -> 2.09 -> 2.46

But 8.98, 10.50, 8.45 and 9.75 all worked correctly.

[Max]

I would suggest that you make everything tax exempt for Actinic, that way the prices you publish remain unchanged and under the price insert text in to the template with something like "all prices are vat inclusive price" or words to that effect, that way you have solved the problem of rounding up and down prices.

Max

[L'il Suzie]

Now that explains something - my copy of Excel does seem to have a life of its own at times...!

So is there a cure? so far I've been fiddling with my calculator and trying to find a VAT-exclusive price which seems to fit the bill - what do other people do?

And can someone remind me why I can't just use VAT-inclusive prices - my trainer said it was to do with end-of-year accounting - have I remembered this right?