Hi @newmediadenver ,
Hopefully I can help answer some of your questions from this post and from the video as well.
1. The tax rate for Arvada Colorado appears to be incorrect.
Colorado tax rates are complex, and there are many pieces that have to be accounted for in order for the correct rates to be calculated. This may include order origin (where it is shipped from), order destination, order value and content, etc. It is possible that with your configuration you may have nexus in the state of Colorado but not specifically in Arvada and so don’t have to collect the 3.46% city sales tax. If you contact our support team at [email protected] we can look into your configuration and nexus settings and determine if the correct tax is being calculated on your site for that area.
2. What happens when the “Sales Tax Calculation” setting is disabled?
When this setting is disabled our plugin reverts back to WooCommerce’s default tax calculation. When disabled none of our code interferes, changes or alters the way WooCommerce calculates tax.
3. If you revert back to WooCommerce’s default tax calculation why is tax not working in the scenario shown in the video? (Where tax was showing as 0% for the 80002 zip code after the “Sales Tax Calculation” setting in TaxJar was disabled).
Initially you were correct on why WooCommerce was not calculating tax after disabling TaxJar tax calculation. Once TaxJar is disabled you will have to populate the WooCommerce tax table with your own values in order for it to calculate tax. However, in the data you used to populate the tax tables there remained some issues. WooCommerce uses five pieces of data to pull a tax rate from its table: Country, State, Zip, City and Product Tax Class. In the scenario you showed, you had the city for the rate set as ARVADA (JEFFERSON). When you entered the shipping information for the order you used a city of: Arvada. Because this does not exactly match the city that was in the rate you showed, ARVADA (JEFFERSON), WooCommerce did not find a corresponding rate in the table and so defaulted to 0%. If you remove the “(JEFFERSON)” portion from the city in the tax table the rate will function as you intend.
4. Why did TaxJar override the rate I manually entered into the tax table? This was after you reenabled TaxJar tax calculation but then altered the rate in the tax table.
Tax rates are very dynamic and more data is needed than what WooCommerce by default uses (country, state, city, zip, tax class) to accurately calculate them. There are scenarios where the number and value of the items in the order will affect the tax rate for a jurisdiction, jurisdictions that take into account the origin as well as the destination for the order, and other scenarios that have to be accounted for. In order to accurately return the correct rates our plugin sends all the necessary order data to TaxJar for each unique cart. It only use the WooCommerce tax table as a way to interface with WooCommerce and apply the rates it got from TaxJar to the order. So when TaxJar is calculating rates only the real time rate from TaxJar will be used, regardless of what has been stored in the tax table.
5. How do I remove TaxJar?
As indicated above when the “Sales Tax Calculation” setting is disabled, only the default WooCommerce tax calculation is used. If you want to completely remove the plugin simply deactivate it in WordPress. When a plugin is deactivated in WordPress none of its code is run on the site. If you know you will not want to use the plugin again, you can also delete the plugin from WordPress to completely remove it from your site.
Please let me know if you have any additional questions or if there is anything else I can help you with.
Thanks!
