When a customer is added, it defaults to the local city. I use a combo box to allow the user to select the tax area. I do not depend on the city because the my users have problems spelling CAT even if you spot them the C and the A. Plus, when I started being that restrictive [only letting them pick cities in my tax table], the users started complaining. Their reasoning was they wanted to be able to enter a city outside their area and use the local tax area because of mail order.

Also, if the customer walks in the store, the pay the tax rate of the city the store is located in. If the order is delivered by the store, the taxrate of the recipient's city is to be applied. The way I have to handle that is have the user indicate if the sale is in-store or for delivery.

What you ultimately do depends on your customer needs. I hope I have given you good ideas.

>Hi Mark,
>
>Thanks for help. One question, is the tax area assigned to the customer automatically? Do you do that by matching the customer city against the TaxArea city?
>
>
>>I use a sales tax table. My customer table has a FK field with the TaxArea [PK] value from my TaxArea table. In my TaxArea table I have the following fields:
>>
>>TaxArea I
>>City C(40)
>>TaxRate N(9,6)
>>ExemptRate N(9,6)
>>StateRate N(9,6)
>>
>>The Exempt Rate field seems superfluous because in all cases [except 1] I have encountered that rate is 0%. In Louisiana all tax exempt sales are still taxed at 4%. If you need more breakdown, you could include a CityRate, MetroRate, CountyRate, etc. All depends on your level of detail needs.
>>
>>In my Invoices table I do have to duplicate these rates for all invoices in case the current TaxRates change [and they always do]. That way I always have a history with the invoice of what the sales tax rate was at the time of the old invoices.