Looking for a payment hook for my Tax extension

[awasson]

Hi Guys,

I'm back on task to finally get my Tax extension completed and one of the areas I need to attend to is to capture information when a payment transaction is made. I'd like to capture the following information:

Financial Type (Donation, Member Dues, Campaign Contribution, Event Fees, etc...)
Invoice ID
Amount

Is there a hook I can invoke in my extension that will deliver this info?

I'm leaning towards hook_civicrm_alterPaymentProcessorParams( $paymentObj,&$rawParams, &$cookedParams );

Any tips or direction would be helpful and appreciated

Thanks,
Andrew
 

[Erik Hommel]

Have you checked if there is a financial entity you can capture in the post hook?

[awasson]

Thanks for the reply Erik. Your name looked familiar and then I noticed you and I were both reviewers for Tony Horrock's CiviCRM Cookbook. Small world!

I'm almost certain that the anwer lies in hook_civicrm_alterPaymentProcessorParams(): https://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/hook_civicrm_alterPaymentProcessorParams

It would be super handy to use it because it fires when the contribution is confirmed so I can save data to my database for reporting right then and there. Furthermore, it references $paymentObj, &$rawParams, &$cookedParams so I should be able to grab my values, process the tax (calculate and add to the total) and then add it to the cookedParams for processing.

I'm scratching my head wondering how I can explore the $paymentObj and $rawParams but I'm not making any headway.

[awasson]

Ok, progress 

I'm pretty happy with this little bit of progress.

I added hook_civicrm_alterPaymentProcessorParams($paymentObj, &$rawParams, &$cookedParams) to my extension and then because it fires at payment confirmation and redirects without hanging around, I lost my mind trying to figure out what was contained inside. To resolve that issue, I loaded the $rawParams array into a session object and used print_r() to place it in a modal popup I could review. Sure enough it contains all the good stuff I'm looking for:

$invoice_id = $rawParams['invoiceID'];
$total_amount = $rawParams['amount'];
$contributionType_accounting_code = $rawParams['contributionType_accounting_code'];

This is actually better than I expected because running a query against the civicrm_financial_account table I can pull out all the information about that particular financial type; ie: donation, member dues, etc...

Not only that but if I set up is_tax, tax_rate within the accounts admin section, I can apply taxes to those transactions with a couple of lines of code.

This is a good day!

[Erik Hommel]

Glad you are making progress!

[awasson]

Thanks Erik,

Yup, I've got the transaction part completely covered using that hook and I'm moving onto reporting.

Cheers,
Andrew

[Jens-Erik]

Hi Andrew,

could you tell what your tax extension will do? I'm thinking about writing an invoice extension, as someone proposed to me. The invoice must fulfil the EU requirements like a unique id and it should include VAT ID, and the VAT depends on the country of the customer and if the customer gives his or her VAT id. Is your extension doing something similar?

Jens

[awasson]

Hi Jens,

The tax extension will charge one or more taxes to a civicrm_financial_type and then report the taxes charged in the detailed contribution report. At this time it doesn't differentiate regions or countries but with some effort it could certainly be leveraged to do so.

Have a look at what I've done and if you'd like to add to it by all means do so. It does pretty much what I needed it to do for my use case but as I've been working on it, I've had ideas for improvement and I've heard from people like yourself with more complex needs. There is another group working towards a more sophisticated tax system. I have no idea where they are in their work but you can see some of their documentation here: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=83493410

Cheers,
Andrew

[Jens-Erik]

Thanks for your information, Andrew!
Cheers,
Jens

[jamien-www.compucorp.co.uk]

Hi all,

Just a quick update on this.

VAT (% based sales tax) and invoicing support will be in version 4.5 of CiviCRM and will hopefully have a version that works with version 4.4 in the next few weeks (although this will not be publicly available for download initially).

We at Compucorp are working with the core team and Webaccess to develop this functionality.

The specification is available here:

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Sales+Taxes+and+Invoicing+-+Phase+1

and the new features will be available to test in the next few weeks.

I'll be making a blog post about this in the not too distant future now that we have some screen shots and more information

Best

Jamie

[Jens-Erik]

Thanks, Jamie,

 that sounds promising. Anyway, I have taken a look at the tutorial on extensions, and I will continue.

[awasson]

Jamie,

That is great news about the progress you're making with the tax support in Core. I've been following some of the work through the various wiki postings and I am really excited about that!

Let me know if you'd like to add me to your testing effort.

Cheers,
Andrew