Automated Taxes overwrites Standard Tax Rates

  • Resolved davidwilbourn

    (@davidwilbourn)


    3 years, 4 months ago

    I am based in the Netherlands and selling to the UK and other countries. With Automated Tax enabled WooCommerce adds 20% to any orders from the UK. My accountant has told me that I should not be charging VAT to any customers in the UK, either business or private. I have the Aelia EU VAT Assistant however that only allows me to remove VAT for customers with a valid UK VAT number, it still adds VAT for private customers. The Aelia developer is sure that this is the correct interpretation of the UK VAT rules but my accountant insists that his interpretation of the Dutch VAT rules is correct ??
    To comply with my accountants orders, I set the Standard Rate for the UK to 0% in the Standard Rates table however with Automated Taxes enabled this gets overwritten with the normal 20% the moment anyone enters a UK address.
    If I disable the Automated Taxes I can delete the GB entry from the Standard Rates table and it stays deleted. However I am worried what effects that will have on other countries. For example, if I sell a product to a US customer who should be paying State Sales Tax, will that be handled correctly?

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Plugin Support AW a11n

    (@slash1andy)

    Automattic Happiness Engineer

    Hey there!

    To comply with my accountants orders, I set the Standard Rate for the UK to 0% in the Standard Rates table however with Automated Taxes enabled this gets overwritten with the normal 20% the moment anyone enters a UK address.

    Automated taxes will calculate the taxes based on Taxjar’s large tax rate database, so it will override the entered taxes.

    If you have a special tax situation that requires you to not use the automated taxes feature, I would say you are going to need to set up that rate manually.

    I would be very surprised if the Taxjar database was wrong, to be honest.

    Thread Starter davidwilbourn

    (@davidwilbourn)

    Thanks for the reply. I’m not saying the database is wrong, the VAT rate for the UK is certainly 20%. It’s just that the requirements of post Brexit VAT taxation require that VAT not be charged in my situation – at least in the opinion of my accountant.

    My main concern is how all the other country’s tax requirements will be affected with the Automated taxes disabled.

    It would be nice if there was an ‘override’ rates list in addition to the Standard, Reduced and Zero so that the Automated option could be used for the majority of customers but with some specific rates set by the user rather than the database.

    Plugin Support AW a11n

    (@slash1andy)

    Automattic Happiness Engineer

    Hey again!

    If you set a manual rate for a jurisdiction where there’s not a rate, it will use that. It will not override the automated taxes however.

    My main concern is how all the other country’s tax requirements will be affected with the Automated taxes disabled.

    If you don’t have automated taxes enabled, it will not set rates for anywhere else, and you will have to manually set up all tax rates on your site.

    Another option is to look at using a service like Avalara or TaxJar, as I believe you can set up override rates like you were wanting.

    Those services will have a monthly fee to use.

    Plugin Support Tseten a11n

    (@tibetanitech)

    We haven’t heard back from you in a while, so I’m going to mark this as resolved – we’ll be here if and/or when you are ready to continue.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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