Another VAT problem I need help with!

[sfreeman]

This time, it's doing things right... but if you were to select your country as United States for instance, so not paying any VAT, Actinic removes the VAT element from the price of the item... I can see why it does that... but the trouble is.. orders from countries who don't pay VAT should be paying the gross amount even if they're not actually paying any VAT. Any way around this that people know of?

Thanks again!

Sam

[the_bfb]

VAT

I'm with you on this and have exactly the same problem however I think your logic is wrong.

Customer in UK buys a £1 item - they are charged £1.17 for it because the tax man wants his extra 17.5p

It is only a £1 item

Assuming it costs you 0 to make for agument's sake,
You do not make £1.17 on it (Even though you can claim your VAT back) your profit is only £1.

Therefore Actinic's charging of net price is correct - I think!
It just seems wrong to us.

Any accountants out there?

[sfreeman]

I'm only posting questions raised by the accountants of my clients! For instance, the cost of a jacket is £25.99 on their shop... someone in the states would get it for £22 or somewhere thereabouts cos the tax gets knocked off.. that's fine and dandy to me! But they actually want to charge the gross price for overseas orders rather than net.

It's all very confusing to me... lol!

[cdicken]

In order to do this you would really need to get a new license of Actinic and set up a second catalogue of products for your overseas customers.

[edwardk]

Let me see if I got this right: Actinic has the facility to allow over seas and domestic customers to buy from an Actinic site, but doesn't have the ability to managing the VAT and, by extension, the over all sell price correctly?

I believe that this is not the first serious issue raised about Actininc and it's inability to properly handle VAT. Chris, I think someone back there needs to get an accountant involved in the devlopment process and look at these issues. Let's face it, Actinic is not cheap and certain levels of functionality and quality are to be expected.

Ed

[sfreeman]

To be fair, Actinic is great at what it does for the shopfront. But it is one thing my client has said as well, that maybe it'd be good for future versions to have the financial management side sorted out a bit. Maybe with compatibility with existing finance packages such as FINEST and SAGE?

[cdicken]

Ed/Sam

Thank you for your comments. Let me just see if I can understand this correctly.

You want to sell the products overseas ar a different net price then you sell them to UK customers. UK customers then have VAT added to make it the same price as the net price for overseas customers.

To me this still sounds like you are selling the same product at two different prices, something that has always required two separate licenses of the software (unless you use Business to create customer accounts for your overseas customers).

I will, however, pass on your comments to the development team for possible inclusion in a future release.

[cdicken]

Sam

See if this link helps:

http://www.hmce.gov.uk/business/trad...adinter-20.htm

Basically it says that postal exports to non EU countries are "Zero-rated in the UK provided they are direct exports and necessary evidence of posting is held."

[sfreeman]

I think it's all got rather confusing, to be honest Chris! We've now reverted to having tax being worked out on products, but not on shipping.... cos for some reason it seemed Actinic was adding VAT to delivery costs to overseas customers as well!

[cdicken]

At the risk of adding more confusion....

If you change the tax treatment on your shipping to 'Pro-Rata' then Actinic will charge tax on shipping in proportion to the amount of tax that has been calculated on the goods in the order.

In english this means that VAT won't be charged on shipping if it has not been charged on anything else.

[sfreeman]

ooooh.... that's starting to sound about right!

Cheers Chris!