Hi Sam,

You should create a Filter for all Customers where the State (Province) is ON and the Tax Type <> 1. Another Filter could list all Customers where the Tax Group <> "CANADA". A third could list all customers where the Province <> "ON" and the Province <> "AB" just to quickly make sure that those are set up correctly. You could also have a Filter that Highlights the Customer in RED if the Tax Group and tax Code do not follow the rules you have defined above.

Filters are great for quickly checking exception conditions.

This is both a comment and a question.

I like to define an Adagio tax group as follows: A tax group is (1) a group that attracts a unique set of taxing authorities and (2) can make tax rate changes independently of other the other tax groups.

In Canada, I set up 13 Tax Groups, one each for the 10 provinces and the 3 territories. Even though Ontario and BC, for example, both attract the same taxing authority, HST, they can nonetheless change their HST rates independently of each other, so they fall into their own Tax Groups in my scheme of things. This makes changing tax rates very easy.

Each Tax Group is assigned its appropriate tax authorities, such as GST, PST, HST, etc.

In most, but not all cases, there only need to be 2 tax statuses, Taxable and Non Taxable for both items and customers. I can see where another status, “Partly Taxable” might be appropriate in special cases. When the item and customer tax statuses are not the same, the lower will always prevail on invoices, as it should.

Whenever I have made these changes for clients, I export customers, ship to addresses and items, make the appropriate changes in Excel and import. Open orders might take some Gridview r/w work to align them with the new system.

In trying to keep things simple, whenever possible I prefer to have a single universal invoice that will work with all tax groups. Here is where I need help. Suppose there is an invoice with only one sales tax being charged. My universal invoice uses the following codes for sales taxes
V11 F01
V12 F03
V13 F04
If the tax represented by V11 is the only sales tax being charged on an invoice, printing of V12 and V13 is suppressed, but F03 and F04 show as zeros, which is a bit confusing. Are there better spec codes that I should be using?

Hi Brian,

Is your invoice spec for Adagio Invoices or Adagio OrderEntry? I assume OE.
Do you set up your tax group jurisdictions to print as Details, or in the Footer only?

If your universal invoice spec has 'footer' codes to print the total tax for 3 particular jurisdictions in the last page footer section, and the customer invoice in question only has one jurisdiction for their tax group, then the codes that print amounts for the other jurisdictions will print 0.00. There is no logic in the designer to suppress numeric amounts if zero.

Typically most customers for a company get charged tax for a specific number of jurisdictions, and a smaller set of customers are charged a different set of tax jurisdictions. You would have to make a copy of your spec and remove/change the fields and labels for tax jurisdictions that don't get charged. Then assign default invoice specs to customers for which tax jurisdictions are the exceptions rather than the general rule.

The other way to print taxes is to put them in the detail section. For overall taxes on the invoice, this would use the detail section type of Misc Charges/Taxes, and the Tax Group must be edited to allow printing taxes on the detail. You can also insert detail sections with a type of 'Detail tax jurisdication x', but that would print the tax for each item and I suspect that is not the desired result here.

Having a universal specification is a laudable goal, but as you found, nothing about taxes is universal.