Sage 100

Has anyone had to deal with a Sugar Tax yet? Boulder Colorado enacted an excise tax on sugar in beverages. Normal drinks are taxed based upon the amount of sugar that is in the drink. However, if you sell a concentrate it is based upon the amount of sugar that is in the diluted form. In other words it is possible that every item could have a different amount of tax applied to it. My understanding is that there is a few other cities on the west coast going through this too. Has anyone come up with a solution using out of the box Sage 100. Kits will not work for this client since they do not want to make their order entry people check to see if the customer is sugar taxable or not when processing an order.

OMG, that's crazy!

Luckily Santa Fe, NM voted no to the sugar tax. That tax would have been $2 per ounce on soft drinks, juices and sports drinks.

The tax in NM would have been on the item, not the customer. Which is it for Boulder?

It is on the item and paid by the customer. The issue is my client delivers to Boulder, so this only affects those deliveries.

A script would work

Without scripting, the only way I see to do it is to add something like S1, S2 for Sugar Tax 1, Sugar Tax 2 to Sales Tax Class Maintenance for every possibility (hopefully there aren't many). Then add a Tax Code to Sales Tax Code Maintenance for every possibility in Class Maintenance and add the matching tax class and the tax rate. Then when entering the item on a sales order, you can override the Tax Class. However, the person entering the order would need to know if the tax applied or not. Would the delivery address indicate if the sugar tax applied?

If anyone starts taxing caffeine, I'm moving to Europe!

We've considered scripting, but short of writing a monster of a script, we came up with creating a misc. charge line per line item so it would post to a liability account. But that has its drawbacks.

Just curious, does AvaTax address this? They discuss soda taxes on their website. ""Soda tax Soda taxes are slowly sweeping the nation. The Navajo Nation decided in 2014 to imposed higher taxes on sugary drinks and ""minimal-to-no-nutritional value food."" Special taxes on sweetened beverages took effect in Berkeley, California in January 2015 and in Vermont six months later. On November 8, voters in four cities approved proposed soda taxes, and two days later, the Cook County Council did the same. Philadelphia's soda tax takes effect on January 1, and similar taxes take effect in Boulder, Colorado, Oakland, California, and Cook County, Illinois on July 1, 2017. Pundits predict more cities and states will soon follow suit, now that soda taxes have been successfully enacted in these areas. Certainly there is interest. Alabama Governor Robert J. Bentley has been calling for a tax on soft drinks for years and is likely to renew those efforts in 2017."" - https://www.avalara.com/blog/2016/12/01/2017-sales-tax-changes/

Avalara does not have any plans to enhance their product to support it.

Good to know Steve. Sorry it didn't work.

Colorado Sugar Tax= munchies legislation. (sorry couldn't resist)

I don't think it would be a monster of a script if you use UDF and or UDT. It would look at the ship to state or ## field and then calculate the Sugar Tax by the UDF. @AlnoorCassim please chime in. I'm sure you can do this. I actually might need something like this for Tobacco Tax based on cost :(

Hey @AlnoorCassim - you might check with Emre on this as I know some of our Illinois-based companies need to comply with the Cook County sugar tax on our mobile apps. He mentioned that he is working on something for this.

Hi @SteveMarek - This could be done in an efficient, non-cantankerous way thru scripting or custom programming by making it table driven (UDT) like Diane said. Create a UDT with columns for Item Code (or Product Line), Customer Type (something to designate a sugar customer), Ship-To-State, Excise Tax Rate, and more if needed. To make it search fast, your Primary Key column would be a multi-part key consisting of the 1st three fields but separated by a symbol. Then when your script or program fires off after the S/O line has been entered, it ""assembles"" the UDT key including the symbols and then will be able to quickly get the correct tax rate. Prior to all this you would have your client prepare an Excel sheet so you can get the rates into the UDT. Send me a chat if you want more info.

@PaulZiliak - Thanks for that info. I'll hit up Emre. Headline: ""Cookie Monster Tax hits Cook County and most parts of the West

Did you say Cookie? Oh, wait! I changed my Twitter avatar.

@RobertWood Everyone said Cookie

Here in Philadelphia the Sugar Tax (called the Soda Tax) is charged to the Distributor who sells to the Reseller (who then sells to the general public). All Distributors who sell Sugar Drinks in the City of Philadelphia, even if they are outside the city; are required to Collect and Remit the $ 0.015 per ounce tax. In reality, I have no idea how they are doing this unless they are just raising their selling price then calculating at the end of the month the items that require a tax paid back to the City. I do know that almost every street vendor (Food Truck) now offers ""meals"" and a drink comes with every meal. No soft drinks sold by themselves. I think this way, if the retailer is not actually ""selling"" any Sugar or Soda Beverages; they feel free to drive over the bridge to NJ and buy their drinks to ""give away"" without paying a Sugar Tax. ... And without the hassle of telling a consumer that the Pepsi bottle is $ 2.30 but the Diet Pepsi bottle is $ 2.00.

Closing the loop on my original post, DSD solution SO-1052 was designed for bottle taxes on containers. However, with some minor modification it now works for the Boulder Sugar tax. My client just finished testing and is waiting to go live on it July 1st. It was very quick and easy to install and configure and appears very solid.

Thanks for the follow up!