[Feature] How to Applying and Displaying Multiple Taxes

[shahnawab]

How to apply and save multiple taxes, with each tax title and amount shown in Invoice PDF?

Like for example in India there is GST Tax System in which if Biller and Consumer is are of same state then 18% tax is written as
Central Tax 9%
State Tax 9%

And if states are different then a single tax of 18% is applied.

So in invoice need to show both of the taxes in case state is same.

how to achieve this.

[daftspunk]

The plugin supports this feature. Take a look at the Compound checkbox in the Tax Rules table to apply compounding tax rates.

[mohsin]

I don't think the user means compounding but rather displaying multiple taxes in the invoice. I checked the code and it doesn't really add up taxes. As soon as a match is found, the loop stops and returns that single rate. Even the code that renders the invoice is limited to a single value and there's a hardcoded string "Sales Tax" when very well it could even be a service tax or other tax depending on the country. Even though there is a for loop, the actual implementation seems to be limiting taxes to a single tax as calculateInvoiceTaxes which calculates the tax and that has a single tax class ID. The right approach to support multiple taxes and also remove opinionation would be to let the user's entered values inside the table be listed directly (preferably in order of listing besides priority) so if there are multiple taxes in the same country/state then ideally it should list both and the total tax needs to be the sum.

[daftspunk]

Hey @mohsin

That makes sense. I suppose my question would be:

• How would it appear on the invoice?
• Does each line item need to keep the tax amounts separate, or can they remain compounded?

[mohsin]

Hi

• It would appear in the invoice like this:

The total tax display is completely optional as I've seen some invoices not display it.

• Yes, the tax amounts are kept separate.

The above is the most USUAL way it works.

But I've seen it get super tricky on restaurants bills. There is an optional service charge component that some fine dining restaurants add (usually 10%) and the law says for food the tax is 5% (split between state and central as 2.5% each) whereas services are charged at 18% (charges at 9% each for state and central). But this gets super tricky with bills because if a bill is 1000, and the restaurant charges 10% service charge and the customer doesn't demand to waive it off, then the bills looks like this:

Subtotal	₹1000.00
Service Charge (10%)	₹100.00
Central Tax (9%)	₹99.00
State Tax (9%)	₹99.00
Total Tax	₹198.00
Total	₹1198.00

At first you may be confused how the tax values aren't exactly 9% and the total tax isn't 180. But this is because the service charge of ₹100 was taxed at 18% and that's a hidden tax included into the taxes. It is a crappy system and I totally dislike it as it makes things a bit obscure just like the tipping system in some countries but this is how it current works. Including a feature like that would be complex so I would just recommend the usual system as shown above. Maybe including an event to add lines on display of the invoice and tax calculation might solve it if you want to cover this as well.

[daftspunk]

Ok, that's making more sense. In the tax table, if it is marked as "Compound", it should continue processing other tax rules and each time it finds a new rule, add it to the list of compounded taxes (like shown above).

In other words, the design is good, it just doesn't work as expected. Is that right?