CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

It's come up a few times already, but I wanted to highlight it in this Suggestion forum: It would be very useful to have the ability to add a tax on amounts in CiviContribute. This is particularly relevant for events, which have taxes on them in Canada for most organizations: regular non-profits, for profits, and governments charging for events, but not non-profits that are charitable (nb: advocacy and political organizations don't qualify as charitable).

Up till now Canadians and probably others have had to include the tax for an event in the price of the ticket. This can complicate reporting, since the amounts for different items and the taxes on them need to be back-calculated from the total after the fact, which bookkeepers aren't always happy about. Making it really problematic is that the tax rates in some provinces are changing next July, and reporting net and taxes accurately for periods including sales before and after that date isn't trivial. Storing tax amounts separately in each transaction would alleviate this headache.

On a side note, if this is going to be implemented, I would make it available for CiviContribute pages in general, since occasionally people use CiviContribute for payment transactions that are taxable (eg ad sales for event programs), and it would just flow through to CiviEvent where it is really needed.

might be a great project for the canadian users of civicrm to collaborate and contribute back to core (or sponsor the core team to build an extensible tax framework)

lobo

Well, I'm a Canadian and I'm using civiCRM/Drupal for a project with needs a tax field so I'll jump in here and see if I can get us closer to a solution. I'm not super familiar with the civiCRM Hook API yet though so I may need a little help in getting this thing to work.

* I realize this is an old thread but I thought it might be better just to add to this one than start another similar or identical thread.

So to begin with, because I'm using Drupal as the master framework, I thought a Drupal module would be the best place to start and I'll call the module civiTax. Here's a question right off the bat for anyone who's familiar with the API... Do I need to use hook_civicrm_buildForm() and hook_civicrm_buildAmount()?

I've stubbed out a module and used hook_civicrm_buildForm() with a smarty template to add an empty field to my contribution page but I wonder if I even need to go that route? Can (should) I just use hook_civicrm_buildAmount() and have it add a tax field to all of my forms?

Thanks for any help on this.

Andrew 

Hi All,
Yeah, we are actually making some progress with this  

At the moment it works... It calculates tax, adds it to the final invoice and we've got the pre-tax, tax and Amount showing up on our Donor Report (Detail) with customized criteria to include the additional fields but it needs some refining. I'll post back once we're happy with it and once we've figured out whether it will be a recipe or a custom module.

BTW: I can't take credit for making it happen. I know what I wanted it to do but it was one of my colleagues who put in the work to make it happen.

Cheers,
Andrew

Well, we got it working but it isn't a module, it involves modifying a number of civiCRM core files, adding a couple of database tables and making some custom templates. I'm planning to document it at some point so that the civi guys can decide whether they want to integrate it in some later version but work has been too busy. I'll update this post when I've come up with an article about it.

Andrew

That sounds fantastic and I'm sure Lobo can work it out even without the documentation. If this dev work is rolled into core it would be huge for us Canadian people.(and probably great for other countries) :-)
I think we could also help financially to get it into core (depending on the scope and spec)

Thanks Andrew and Lobo

can anyone update this thread about taxes?

you might want to use drupal.org git sandboxes for code collaboration and the civicrm forums for discussion about it

you might want to start a new thread on it and direct people there

lobo

Thanks for the suggestion Lobo... I have created a new discussion over at the civiCRM Group at Drupal: http://groups.drupal.org/node/182444

@Dave: Feel free to read up on what we've done so far. I still have to review and add the bits about reporting but I'm working on that this evening.

Cheers,
Andrew