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Business-Tax-VAT-0.91
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/ Business::Tax::VAT

NAME

Business::Tax::VAT - perform European VAT calculations

SYNOPSIS

use Business::Tax::VAT;

my $vat = Business::Tax::VAT->new(qw/uk ie/);

my $price = $vat->item(120 => 'ie');
my $price_to_customer = $price->full;     # 120
my $vat_charged       = $price->vat;      #  20
my $net_price_to_me   = $price->net;      # 100

my $price = $vat->business_item(100 => 'uk');
my $price_to_customer = $price->full;     # 117.5
my $vat_charged       = $price->vat;      #  17.5
my $net_price_to_me   = $price->net;      # 100

DESCRIPTION

Charging VAT across the European Union is quite complex. The rate of tax you have to charge depends on whether you're dealing with consumers or corporations, what types of goods you're selling, whether you've crossed thresholds in certain countries, etc.

This module aims to make some of this simpler.

There are several key processes:

CONSTRUCTING A VAT OBJECT

my $vat = Business::Tax::VAT->new(@country_codes);

First of all you have to construct a VAT object, providing it with a list of countries for which you have to charge VAT. This may only be the country in which you are trading, or it may be any of the 15 EC territories in which VAT is collected.

The full list of territories, and their abbreviations, is documented below.

PRICING AN ITEM

my $price = $vat->item($unit_price => $country_code);
my $price = $vat->business_item($unit_price => $country_code);

You create a Price object by calling either the 'item' or 'business_item' constructor, with the unit price, and the country to which you are supplying the goods. This operates on the priciple that prices to consumers are quoted with VAT included, but prices to business are quoted ex-VAT.

If you do not supply a country code, it will default to the first country in the country list passed to VAT->new;

CALCULATING THE COMPONENT PRICES

my $price_to_customer = $price->full;
my $vat_charged       = $price->vat;
my $net_price_to_me   = $price->net;

Once we have our price, we can query it for either the 'full' price that will be charged (including VAT), the 'net' price (excluding VAT), and the 'vat' portion itself.

NON-VATABLE COUNTRIES

If you send goods to many countries, some of which are in your VAT territory and others not, you can avoid surrounding this code in conditionals by calling $vat->item on all items anyway, listing the country to which you are supplying the goods.

If the country in question is not one of the territories in which you should charge VAT then the 'full' and 'net' values will be the same, and 'vat' will be zero.

NON-VATABLE, ZERO-RATED, REDUCED-RATE GOODS

This module does not cope with goods which are not at the 'standard' rate of VAT for a country (as detailed below).

Patches welcomed!

COUNTRIES AND RATES

This module uses the following rates and codes:

at, Austria, 20%
be, Belgium, 21%
dk, Denmark, 25%
fi, Finland, 22%
fr, France, 19.6%
de, Germany, 16%
gr, Greece, 18%
ie, The Republic of Ireland, 20%
it, Italy, 20%
lu, Luxembourg, 15%
nl, The Netherlands, 19%
pt, Portugal, 17%
es, Spain, 16%
se, Sweden, 25%
uk, United Kingdom, 17.5%

FEEDBACK

If you find this module useful, or have any comments, suggestions or improvements, please let me know.

AUTHOR

Tony Bowden, <kasei@tmtm.com>.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (C) 2001 Tony Bowden. All rights reserved.

This module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

WARRANTY

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.