Order Manager
Version 8
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was originally designed to recalculate taxes on all orders imported from a shopping cart because some older shopping cart systems allowed customers to place an order without applying the appropriate sales tax.
If any changes are made to an order, i.e. a line item is added, the quantity or price of an item is revised, or an item is returned, Monsoon Order Manager recalculates the order total. If you do not use the internal tax calculation system, there must be another way for the program to recalculate the taxes and thus the order total. The program makes an educated guess of which tax rate to apply to the order, should it change by following the rules below:
If a shopping cart reports whether a line item is taxable, the program uses this information to estimate the tax on the order. If it does not and the system parameter UseTaxableField in the Program group is False, the program assumes all line items on the order are taxable. If UseTaxableField is set to True, Monsoon Order Manager checks to see if the items are marked Taxable in the Inventory screen.
The program depends on the merchant to tell it how to handle this by setting the Program group system parameter CalcTaxRateIncludeShipping. By default, CalcTaxRateIncludeShipping is False which means the shipping charges are NOT included in the product total prior to calculating tax. Set this parameter to True if you know for sure your shopping cart DOES include the shipping charges in the tax calculation. (Note: This parameter is usable only if CheckTaxRates is False.)
Most shopping carts do not tell Monsoon Order Manager whether discounts, coupons, surcharges or other "adjustments" were applied to the order (or a particular line item) before or after tax calculation. Therefore, coupons and discounts are assumed to be applied to the product total before tax calculation (pre-tax). Surcharges are assumed to be taxable.
As of version 5.913, you can control how the program calculates the tax when a discount or coupon is applied to an order that contains both taxable and non-taxable items. See system parameter, ProrateDiscountsForTaxes.
Once the final Taxable Product Total is calculated, the program divides the total tax amount received from the shopping cart by the Taxable Product Total to arrive at an "estimated" tax percentage rate to use for future tax calculations against the order in the event that it changes.
As of Version 5.809 of Monsoon Order Manager, the sales tax rate that is in effect when an order is created will remain the same and the program will not attempt to recalculate it in the event of future tax rate changes.
Created: 3/13/12
Revised: 5/28/15
Published: 08/19/15