Enter prices tax-inclusive, and reverse engineer the tax?

Question

I have a client who very much want to be able to enter the prices in Exp-resso Store tax-inclusive, and then calculate how much the tax will be on the order confirmation page.

I know it's not built in, but has anyone done anything like this, or do anyone have any ideas if it'd be plausible in any way?

I'd prefer to not have to hard code any values, I want the client to be able to update tax rates by product groups.

Any advice would be appreciated!

Answer 1

Prices should always be entered ex-tax in the CP, and as Ian mentioned, you can use the _inc_tax variables to display the correct amount to the customer, like:

{price_inc_tax}

It is also not currently possible to specify different tax rates per product group.

However, without going into too much detail, both tax-inclusive prices in the CP and different taxes rates per product category will be in the next version of Store. We don't have a planned release date yet though so your best bet is to work with the tax-exclusive pricing for the time being.

Answer 2

I'd recommend that when entering product prices they're entered without tax and then you can choose whether to include tax in the product prices when displayed in your templates or not with a simple tag:

{price_inc_tax}

If you want to summarise this on the order confirmation page there are tags for that too:

{order_tax}

You can pretty much use any of the existing tags and simply append '_tax' to display the tax rates including for sub-totals, shipping, etc.

The only tricky bit I see is the bit where you mention about applying tax rates per product group. In most carts tax rates are applied by country or region so doing it by product group could be trickier. Is there a particular reason for that?

I guess if you know the tax rate for a product group and have a way of tagging it as such (using a category, a custom field, or a custom channel) then you could just use the standard Store tags and then a little calculation to add/deduct the tax percentage.

Answer 3

You would need to have a custom extension to handle something like this. You would want to use the store_process_product_tax hook to check which category (channel or whatever you are using to distinguish product groups) to calculate the required tax amount.