A different approach to tax calculation

Uploading Tax-Inclusive Price

I’m working with a retailer in Australia. The way they look at tax (GST) is different to the way that HikaShop currently operates.

In Australia, all retail pricing includes GST by default. Pricing is targeted at a consumer price point, for example $19.95 is what the customer will pay, not $21.95 ($19.95 plus GST). The retailer simply works out how much of the purchase price is GST and sends that to the government as GST revenue.

My customer, the retailer, does not think of GST as something to be added before sale, but as something to be recovered after sale. GST is almost viewed as just another overhead before profit.

Our GST rate is a flat 10%. In this example, the retailer would take $19.95 from their customer, give $1.81 to the government and keep $18.14 for themselves to pay their suppliers and take a profit.

I know that when creating a product manually, you can state either the pre-tax or post-tax pricing, however, CSV uploads only appear to support the pre-tax price. For example, for a post-GST price of $19.95, I need to load a pre-GST price of “$18.13636364” so that I’m assured of getting the cents right.

Is there a feature within HikaShop to allow prices imported via CSV to INCLUDE tax?

GST Calculation Accuracy

Australia has 2 acceptable methods of GST calculation “Total invoice approach” or the “Line item approach”. HikaShop seems to use the “line item approach”, but rounds the GST to whole cents for each item. When using the “line item approach” you are supposed to calculate as many decimal places as possible (HikaShop appears to use 5 decimal places when a “Price with tax” is entered) and total those amounts before rounding at the end. Rounding at each item can result in inaccurate GST. Yes, the amounts will be trivial for small purchase prices, but the effect can easily grow for large purchases.

Hi evolution,

About the upload problem it's something you cannot do with Hikashop since the tax-inclusive price aren't stocked in the database (these prices are dynamicly calculated depending of the tax you specified. We just added it to the todo list and we'll try to add this feature.

For your second problem it can be solved by activating the tax overriding plugin ("HikaShop tax calculations override plugin"). Be sure to have the last version of Hikashop and this plugin will change the calculation in order to avoid the kind of rounding you're evocating.