Our company currently allows customers to purchase thier items and have them shipped. In a number of cases, these items are being shipped out of state. In these cases, the sales tax charged on the order is based on the shipping address (this is what the tax attorneys have told us). This means that we need to use the Customer Taxes functionality in RMS StoreOps.
Since we have a business presence (not necessarily a retail store, but a sales force) in nearly all 50 states, we have to charge sales tax whenever something is shipped, and remit the taxes collected to the apporpriate authorities on a periodic basis. We have neither the time or the resources to research and maintain the tax codes for 50 states, let alone all of the county and local taxes.
I am looking for a third-party software package which will do one of two things:
-- Provide a web service (and perhaps the necessary RMS customization) to determine the appropriate tax district(s) and taxes to charge based on the customer's city, state, and zip
-- Provide a set of records (in some format which can be read or imported into SQL) which will populate the RMS ItemTax and SalesTax tables, and provide periodic updates to these records, so the burden of maintining all of the different tax codes is done with a few SQL INSERT and UPDATE commands.
I'm not necessarily looking for some freebie utility. Free is nice, but we need a company which can go to bat for us in case of an audit. We are planning on expanding our retail chain to the Southeast (Florida) and the Upper Midwest (Wisconsin), and we are counting on there being a lot of tourist traffic or out-of-state visitors. This is a BIG need, and one we need to get resolved in a relatively short period of time (within the next 4-6 months).