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VatCalculator

Handle all the hard stuff related to EU MOSS tax/vat regulations, the way it should be. Can be used with Laravel 5 / Cashier — or standalone.

Contents

• Installation
  • Standalone
• Usage
  • Calculate the gross price
  • Receive more information
  • Validate EU VAT numbers
    • Laravel Validator extension
  • Get EU VAT number details
  • Cashier integration
  • Get the IP based country of your user
  • Frontend integration - vat_calculator.js
    • Integrating it in your payment form
    • Extra fields
    • Form attributes
    • Form fields
    • Advanced usage
    • Preconfigured routes
• Configuration (optional)
• Changelog
• License

Installation

In order to install the VAT Calculator, just run

Standalone

You can also use this package without Laravel. Simply create a new instance of the VAT calculator and use it. All documentation examples use the Laravel 5 facade code, so make sure not to call the methods as if they were static methods.

Example:

Usage

Calculate the gross price

To calculate the gross price use the calculate method with a net price and a country code as paremeters.

The third parameter is the postal code of the customer.

As a fourth parameter, you can pass in a boolean indicating whether the customer is a company or a private person. If the customer is a company, which you should check by validating the VAT number, the net price gets returned.

Receive more information

After calculating the gross price you can extract more information from the VatCalculator.

Validate EU VAT numbers

Prior to validating your customers VAT numbers, you can use the shouldCollectVAT method to check if the country code requires you to collect VAT in the first place.

To validate your customers VAT numbers, you can use the isValidVATNumber method. The VAT number should be in a format specified by the VIES. The given VAT numbers will be truncated and non relevant characters / whitespace will automatically be removed.

This service relies on a third party SOAP API provided by the EU. If, for whatever reason, this API is unavailable a VATCheckUnavailableException will be thrown.

Get EU VAT number details

To get the details of a VAT number, you can use the getVATDetails method. The VAT number should be in a format specified by the VIES. The given VAT numbers will be truncated and non relevant characters / whitespace will automatically be removed.

This service relies on a third party SOAP API provided by the EU. If, for whatever reason, this API is unavailable a VATCheckUnavailableException will be thrown.

Laravel Validator Extension

If you want to include the VAT number validation directly in your existing Form Requests / Validations, use the vat_number validtion rule.

Example:

Important: The validator extension returns false when the VAT ID Check SOAP API is unavailable.

Cashier integration

If you want to use this package in combination with Laravel Cashier you can let your billable model use the BillableWithinTheEU trait. Because this trait overrides the getTaxPercent method of the Billable trait, we have to explicitly tell our model to do so.

By using the BillableWithinTheEU trait, your billable model has new methods to set the tax rate for the billable model.

Set everything in one command:

• setTaxForCountry($countryCode, $company = false)

Or use the more readable, chainable approach:

• useTaxFrom($countryCode) — Use the given countries tax rate
• asIndividual() — The billable model is not a company (default)
• asBusiness() — The billable model is a valid company

So in order to set the correct tax percentage prior to subscribing your customer, consider the following workflow:

Get the IP based Country of your user(s)

Right now you'll need to show your users a way to select their country - probably a drop down - to use this country for the VAT calculation.

This package has a small helper function, that tries to lookup the Country of the user, based on the IP they have.

The $countryCode will either be false, if the service is unavailable, or the country couldn't be looked up. Otherwise the variable contains the two-letter country code, which can be used to prefill the user selection.

Frontend integration — vat_calculator.js

Phew - so you know how to use this class, built your fancy payment form and now...? Well - you want to display the correct prices to your users and want it to update dynamically. So go ahead, add some routes, write some Javascript and in no time you'll be up and running, right?

Or you use the built in routes and vat_calculator.js library.

The VAT Calculator JS library will automatically:

• Calculate taxes whenever the selected country value changes
• Automatically validate VAT-IDs / VAT numbers and use it for the calculation
• Prefill the user's country with the IP based country

The Javascript library has no dependencies on third party frameworks.

In order to use the Javascript helper you need to publish the package files first. Go ahead and type:

Now you have a file called vat_calculator.js in your public/js folder.

Integrating it in your payment form

Add the published javascript file to your payment form.

By default, the VAT Calculator JS script is looking for a form with the ID payment-form. This form needs a data-amount attribute specifying the amount to use for the tax calculation in cents (just like Stripe uses it).

So your form should look like this, when you would calculate the taxes for 24.99 €

Next up, you need a dropdown to let your users select their billing country. This select field needs the data-vat="country" attribute, so that the VAT Calculator JS knows, where to look for country codes.

Since there are also quite a few VAT rate exceptions for specific regions or cities, it is highly recommended to add an input field to collect postal codes. This field needs a data-vat="postal-code" attribute.

And last but not least, to automatically validate VAT Numbers / VAT IDs you can have an input field with the data-vat="vat_number" attribute specified.

So your form will look like this:

Extra fields

To display the live tax calculation, you can use the classes vat-subtotal, vat-taxrate, vat-taxes and vat-total on any DOM element and VAT Calculator JS will automatically set the inner HTML content for you.

Example:

Form attributes

Form fields

In order to calculate the right taxes, you need to add some extra inputs to your payment form. All these fields need to have a data-vat attribute. You need to include at least the country.

Advanced usage

Use a different form selector

Use VATCalculator.init('#my-selector') to initialize the live calculation on a different form.

Use a custom formatter function to modify calculation result HTML

Use VATCalculator.setCurrencyFormatter to use a different method to format the calculated values for the HTML output. This function will receive the calculation result as a parameter.

Example:

Trigger calculation manually

Call VATCalculator.calculate() to trigger the calculation manually. For example when you change the data-amount attribute on your form.

Preconfigured routes

In order for VAT Calculator JS to work properly, these routes will be added to your application. If you don't want to use the Javascript library, you can of course disable the routes in the configuration file.

Configuration

By default, the VAT Calculator has all EU VAT rules predefined, so that it can easily be updated, if it changes for a specific country.

If you need to define other VAT rates, you can do so by publishing the configuration and add more rules.

The configuration file also determines wether you want to use the VAT Calculator JS routes or not.

Important: Be sure to set your business country code in the configuration file, to get correct VAT calculation when selling to business customers in your own country.

To publish the configuration files, run the vendor:publish command

This will create a vat_calculator.php in your config directory.

Changelog

Please see CHANGELOG for more information.

License

This library is licensed under the MIT license. Please see License file for more information.