We have bundled items configured in Magento 1.9.2.2, i.e. where we have something like:
- My Special Bundle Product (consisting of:)
- a hardware device
- application software
- a pre-paid stored value card for free one year cloud storage subscription
We have been using Avalara for tax calculating, but now wish to move to TaxJar. So, on my local dev instance of our Magento app, I disabled Avatax, installed the TaxJar 2.1.0 extension, set it all up with a couple tax nexus locations for testing, etc., and then tested by placing an order for one of our hardware/software bundle product offerings.
What my test showed was that TaxJar computed tax on each simple item in the bundle, as expected, but also computed tax on the bundle container item, which shouldn't happen. Interestingly, Magento won't show the tax rate/amount in the order summary line-by-line breakdown, but the total tax amount reflects it - you do the math, and it's easy to see what's happening.
So, I figured that what we could do to stop this behavior is to create a Tax Class (I just named it "Bundle_Placeholder" for now) and assign it the TaxJar value "Other Exempt (99999)". Then I want to set this as the Tax Class on the bundle item configuration, i.e. via Catalog->Manage Products (from the Magento admin app), and then the "Prices" tab. But the problem is, the Tax Class dropdown field is disabled - we can't edit/change it. It's just set to the default "None".
Now, to test my theory that if we could find a way to set the Tax Class on the bundle products to my new "Bundle_Placeholder" class that it would indeed suppress ("exempt") tax from being calculated on the bundle container-level item, I was able to track down a table in the Magento db schema named catalog_product_flat_1 where I can set the tax_class_id to the id of my "Bundle_Placeholder" tax class for a bundle product id. So then when I check-out with a bundle item, the tax is now calculated correctly. So I know that associating the exempt tax class with the bundle items will give the "fix", but as I said, the Tax Class field in Magento admin is disabled for our Bundle products. And the catalog_product_flat_1 seems to be a type of index table, because if I go into Magento admin and "reindex all", the tax_class_id value in catalog_product_flat_1 for my bundle products goes back to the "None" value, and then tax is over-calculated again.
So, anyone have any suggestions how to permanently fix this, without having to delete and then re-create all of our bundle items? (I'm assuming there that magento admin would let us perhaps set the tax class value for a bundle product at create time, but I'm not sure of that...)
Bundle products I believe are a standard part of Magento, so I'm a little surprised that TaxJar doesn't know out-of-the-box to ignore the bundle "container" line item when calculating tax at checkout. Maybe I'm missing some other config trick? I've searched TaxJar's support site and FAQ's, but no cigar yet...
TaxJar 2.1.2 (released on Jun 24) should resolve this calculation issue with bundle products. We had to fix an issue with the way we were associating product IDs with line items from calculation responses coming through our sales tax API. If you find a specific technical problem with our extension, feel free to open a new issue in the official GitHub repo.