Product Suggestion: eConnect POP Tax Engine
Over the last few weeks, Mark Polino, MVP over at DynamicAccounting.net has been posting articles asking you to vote for Product Suggestions using the Microsoft Connect site.
Well now it is my turn....
History
To start with we need a little bit of history:
When the Purchase Order Processing module in Great Plains Dynamics was first written it did not support taxes. You could enter a tax amount manually, but there was no support for Tax Details and Tax Schedules and no automatic calculation of taxes.
When Australia introduced the GST (Goods and Services Tax) in July 2000, a tax engine was required so that taxes could be calculated automatically and included on Purchase Orders (and flow through to the Receivings Invoices). To make this happen by the July 2000 deadline, I was contracted my Great Plains Australia while I worked for Winthrop Dexterity Consultants to write support for POP Taxes into Dynamics v5.50 as well as support for the Business Activity Statement and PAYG Payment Summary reports. Some of the other features needed for Australian GST were coded by the development team in Fargo and between us we had a Dynamics v5.50 GST release ready in time to be deployed at customers before the new tax system went live.
When Great Plains Dynamics and eEnterprise v6.00 was released, the POP Tax engine had been updated and was now part of the core product for all countries.
eConnect
So, now we come to eConnect.
When the eConnect SOP nodes were created there was no automated Tax Engine. The Tax data had to be calculated outside of eConnect and then passed in with the rest of the document. Later a SOP Tax Engine was created. This engine duplicates the functionality of the Dexterity tax engine and allows the tax to be calculated based on the Customer and Item Tax Schedules.
When POP Taxes functionality was added to the core product, it was never added to eConnect. The ability to integrate Tax data has been added, but to this day there is still no automatic POP Tax Engine.
I have seen numerous requests on support cases for a POP Tax Engine and the answer has always been the same:
- There is no POP Tax Engine.
- Calculate the Taxes yourself and integrate the resulting data.
- Vote on the Product Suggestion on Microsoft Connect.
I have had two of these cases in the last couple of weeks. But when I look at the Product Suggestion there are only 5 votes logged for the suggestion.
Considering that I found 45 cases in the support database with a quick search, I find the low count really surprising. This is what prompted this article.
Request
If you or anyone you know wants this functionality, get them to vote using the link below. Go to the link and click on the green up arrow:
While I can't make any promises that if you vote, we will get a POP Tax Engine at any time in the future. I can guarantee that if you don't vote, we will never get a POP Tax Engine. At least it will show if this is worth pursuing at all.
If you have having trouble voting, goto https://connect.microsoft.com/, click on "Directory" in the top right corner. Search for "Dynamics Product Suggestions" and join the Microsoft Dynamics Product Suggestions (Read Only) program.
If you need more information about using Microsoft Connect, please see Scott Stephenson's article on the topic:
If you or anyone in your organisation or organisations you work with would like this functionality PLEASE make the effort and vote for the suggestion.
Thanks
David
16-Jul-2012: Changed links from https to http.
27-Jul-2012: Added instructions for joining the Microsoft Dynamics Product Suggestions (Read Only) program.