WooCommerce North Carolina Sales Tax

(Note: Edited from my original reply)

I too am in NC and am trying to get my sales tax set up in WooCommerce.

Re: the last portion of your question about overlapping zip codes in different cities/counties This might help you think about it a different way: The form that you have to submit to the state only lists the tax percentages as a lump sum, not broke out by county or zip. So, as long as you have your WooCommerce taxes set up by zips with the corresponding tax, you should be fine. I assume the WooCommerce reports will tell you how much tax you charged at the 2% rate, 2.25% rate and so on… plus the state rate of 4.75%. The state takes care of doing the hard part of dyving up who gets what.

Here’s what the state tax payment form looks like if you want to take a look: https://www.dornc.com/downloads/fillin/e500_webfill.pdf

The NCDOR site is a maze of confusing twists and turns, but here’s the link that takes you to the door of the maze: https://www.dor.state.nc.us/taxes/sales/

Good Luck!

Hi there,

I don’t mind sharing my excel, I generated it from that PDF.

Then separated into 3 different priority taxes based on state tax, local tax, and then a variable for those counties that have a transit tax on top of that.

https://1drv.ms/1O5tE1a

The problem is that when you strip out the “County” column for WooCommerce, look at the city of “Clemmons” for example. Same zip code, same city, but 2 different counties with 2 different tax rates. There are many of these instances.

There is no way for WooCommerce to assess the correct tax.

Even the WooTax people who sell spreadsheets told me their spreadsheet wasn’t going to cover scenarios like that with 100% accuracy. It seems like TaxJar would be the only way since it incorporates the county name and generates reports based on that.

Anyone have creative solutions out there? How are people handling this? Are you just tolerating slightly inaccurate tax reports, or are you using TaxJar?

I also submitted a WooCommerce feature/improvement suggestion since technically their platform as-is does not allow North Carolina store owners to operate lawfully (without add-ons like TaxJar or without giving up entirely and listing prices inclusive of tax for a nightmare of reporting later.)

Thanks for any thoughts out there!!

See my edited comment above re: the county/zip question

(I figured out how to convert my pdf by opening on Acrobat Pro and saving as a spreadsheet.)

But again look at the city of Clemmons as an example.

One zip code, yet 2 different tax rates (because the city and zip code overlap into two different counties).

Without a column for County, WooCommerce is not going to know which tax rate to charge, even if I list everything out by zip code.

I just installed TaxJar– NO COUNTY FIELD. So even it that doesn’t solve the problem.

Here’s what I’m probably going to do: For each zip code, round the tax up to the highest rate. At least that way I won’t owe extra tax. I’ll let the state figure the rest out. I mean, their own tax form isn’t as specific as city/county(!), so…

The only other thing I can think of, which would take A LOT of manual work, is to go through and add the 4-digit extension to each zip. But 1) that will probably quadruple the number of zip codes b/c there are multiple four-digit extensions per zip, and 2) there’d have to be some kind of plugin to automatically populate the four-digit extension based on the address becasue most folks have no clue what their zip extension is.

I don’t think the second option is even a possibility. So I’m going with #1.

If you come up with “the” solution, please share!

I agree that is the best way to handle it until further notice…

with the zip+4 method, there’s no guarantee that +4 zips don’t overlap into more than one county and you end up having the same problem.

I will contact TaxJar to clarify … I have seen on their website where they advertise county-specific reporting as a feature

In various correspondences with TaxJar, here is what I learned. Apparently they are not any more accurate than what can be achieved with the approach outlined above… unless you configure the shopping cart (with custom development or a plugin) to validate addresses and/or require zip+4

Initial response from TaxJar:

We handle tax reporting using the 9 digit zip code and the city. For the vast majority of cases using this get the correct rate, however there can be cases where this is not accurate enough.

Later clarifications from TaxJar:

We are as accurate as the city and zip code your shoppers provide. If they only provide a 5 digit zip and no city then we return the zip code match for highest rate. If they provide a city we may get more accurate and if they provide the +4 then we will be that much more accurate.

we do not complete the extra 4 digits of the zip code, because we do not complete an address verification. There are address verification plugins out there that would take care of adding the extra 4 digits to the zip code for you like the one I have linked to below. Please note we are in no way affiliated with the below plugin, it is just the first one I found when I googled address verification plugin for WooCommerce.

https://docs.woothemes.com/document/address-validation/