Tax Mode does not take exemptions into account

[nathansalter]

Proposer

Playfinder/Bookteq

Use Case

The Tax Mode is currently set at the Seller level, but this ignores several cases where the VAT rate will change for different opportunities provided by the same seller. For example, if a seller provides both Football pitches and Classrooms in the same feed, the pitches could be at the 20% VAT rate, but classrooms could be at 0% VAT rate.

Furthermore, there are often VAT discounts for booking blocks of time. I'm not certain about the rules of this but many of our Venues when booking 10 or more weeks at a time will also have a 0% VAT rate. There are also situations where specific Customers will require VAT to be charged (e.g. Businesses) where Individuals and small groups are exempt.

Why is this needed?

Currently Tax Mode only allows a global value, which ignores cases where this may not apply.

Proposal

Add a VatRate and VatAmount per Accepted Offer in the Booking API. Possibly also and VatAmount to the PriceSpecification resource.

[nickevansuk]

It's probably worth pointing out a couple of other areas of the spec that are relevant here:

https://openactive.io/open-booking-api/EditorsDraft/#tax-mode

• This is about the value of Offer.price, and whether it is inclusive or exclusive of VAT. This is indeed at the Seller level.

https://openactive.io/open-booking-api/EditorsDraft/#taxation-0

• The VAT exception notice referenced above is directly accounted for

https://openactive.io/open-booking-api/EditorsDraft/#tax-calculation

• There is a recognition of the difference between B2C and B2B tax calculations

https://openactive.io/open-booking-api/EditorsDraft/#schema-order

• totalPaymentTax and unitTaxSpecification both allow a number of different tax lines for each item. Each of these specifies a custom rate. Hence 0% tax ("rate": 0) can be represented per-item.

      "unitTaxSpecification": [
        {
          "@type": "TaxChargeSpecification",
          "name": "VAT at 20%",
          "price": 1,
          "priceCurrency": "GBP",
          "rate": 0.2
        }
      ],

The above should collectively cover this use case, but interested if anything is missing?

[nathansalter]

Thanks for the concise answer here, I think I'd just got a bit lost in the documentation and your answer in https://github.com/openactive/modelling-opportunity-data/issues/246 does imply that this isn't handled