Bob

Depending on what states you will be working with, sales tax can be very complex. You can have State sales tax, County sales tax, and local or city sales tax. Within that you can have special taxing districts that can be exempt from one or more of those districts and those exemptions can be product specific. My past experience was with retail tire stores and they had the additional issues. A customer could be required to pay city sales tax if he purchased at the tire store. I the delivery truck went to the farm and put on a tire there then he was not taxed city tax because the farm was out of the city limits.

My advice to you is look at a service that sells sales tax data. I am working with CCH now and they will sell their database for 3000.00 a year with monthly updates. Their examples for working with the DB was written in Foxpro.

>I'm designing the tables for a system that will eventually marketed in the US, {I'm in
>Canada and the last time I did any work in the US, Sales Tax was only just starting to be introduced!]
>
>I need some general
>guidlines on Sales Tax calculations. I understand that tax rules can be quite complex, e.g. tax may
>be waived for certain items for certain time periods based on the price. Right now, I'm just
>concerned about the basic table design, the rules can be added later.
>
>I allow for the fact that a customer or a transaction may be exempt from any tax.
>
>1. Are there ever any more than 2 sales taxes?
>
>2. Are sales taxes always a percentage, and never more than 3 decimal places?
>
>3. Are sales taxes always based in the State, or can they vary within different Cities in the same state?
>
>4. For a customer who could be an individual or a company, will the rate
>always be the same?