Wrong VAT on shipping costs and invoice

Hi Johannes,
Our plugin does not interfere with tax calculation, that operation is handled entirely by WooCommerce itself. What our plugins does is collecting VAT data after WooCommerce calculated it, as well as evidence for compliance with the VAT MOSS rules that apply to sales of digital products.

In terms of B2B transactions, what the EU VAT Assistant does is calling a standard WooCommerce function that tells WC not to apply taxes, before the tax calculation. After setting the “tax exempt” flag, tax calculation is left to WooCommerce, as already explained.

Due to the above, any issue with tax calculations depends on WooCommerce itself. My recommendation would be to review all the tax settings, as there might be something incorrect there (taxes are not always easy to configure). You can ignore the EU VAT Assistant settings, they have no relation to the issue.

One thing you have to take into account is that shipping costs are always considered exclusive of tax, even if you select “I will enter prices inclusive of tax“. This behaviour is by design in WooCommerce, it’s currently not possible to change it (although there is an “idea” in the WooCommerce to-do list to allow entering shipping costs inclusive of tax).

In terms of product support, the EU VAT Assistant works correctly with both digital and physical products (they are treated the same way), the only difference between the two is that taxes related to physical products can be excluded from the reports.

Hi Diego –

Sorry for the late response –
and thanks for your competent feedback!

After digging deeper into the sources i identified “Woocommerce German Market” to be the problem. Seems that commercial plugin doesn’t play well with other plugins (unfortunately, this is the second time i discovered that).

Switched to “Woocommerce germanized” – That extension doesn’t cost anything and actually plays very well with your solution.

Sorry for the hazzle and …
Many thanks for your plugin!

BR from Salzburg, Austria,

– Johannes

Hi Johannes,
Thanks for the update. I’m glad to see that you solve the issue. Still, I would suggest to contact the author of the WooCommerce German Market plugin, because the issue you reported is unlikely to be a conflict with the EU VAT Assistant.

As explained, our plugin has no effect on tax calculation at all, it just reads the details the calculated VAT. The issue you described could indicate that something, in the German Market plugin, changes how taxes are calculated, regardless of our plugin. It could be worth to check with its author what, exactly, the plugin does in terms of taxes, as that could produce the wrong results in other conditions as well.