How to represent tax on a deal; should I create a line item to represent taxes?
SOLVE
I am looking to add detail to my deals. So far, my deals have consisted of a general description and an overall total. Very basic. I would like to start adding line items to my deals so I can more fully take advantage of product reporting and forecasting features in HubSpot.
This is my understanding of how to use APIs to add products to a deal:
use the products API to create a simple product entry with a single base price
use the line items API to create a line item that wraps the product entry in additional detail that will override the base price and apply customization specific to my deal
use the associations API to associate the line item wrapper/decorator object to my deal
Once I have all of the products wrapped as line items and associated with my deal, I next need to figure out the tax rate for the shipping address. I have an API I can hit to determine if the state I'm shipping to requires me to assess sales tax and also calculate that tax rate by county and munincipality based on my shipping address. This is the plan I have so far:
tally the custom prices from each line item to get a subtotal for the whole deal
feed that subtotal and the customer shipping address to my external API to calculate taxes for the deal
use the products API to create a product named taxes that has a default price of zero
use the line items API to create a line item that wraps the taxes product and overrides the default price with the amount calculated in step two above
use the associations API to associate the new taxes line item to the deal
I should then have a line item for taxes that is specific to the set of products, prices for this deal and its shipping address.
Is this the preferred way to set taxes for a deal? Will this cause problems with HubSpot's built-in reporting? I assume the HubSpot reports will be able to represent the amount of taxes as just another product if I do it this way. Please let me know if this is not the case.
I haven't coded to the HubSpot Quotes or Line Item API as yet, but given that the Quotes API is still limited in what you can create via the API, your approach of using an extra line item for tax sounds like a sound approach - at least until the HubSpot API allows you to set the tax amount on a quote.
Before going ahead to code it, I'd recommend looking into what happens in HubSpot today where iPaaS providers have integrated tax calculations such as Avalara + HubSpot via tray.io
That might be worth running a trial, even if you end up coding the equivalent yourself, using your existing source of per-state delivery address tax calculations.
I haven't coded to the HubSpot Quotes or Line Item API as yet, but given that the Quotes API is still limited in what you can create via the API, your approach of using an extra line item for tax sounds like a sound approach - at least until the HubSpot API allows you to set the tax amount on a quote.
Before going ahead to code it, I'd recommend looking into what happens in HubSpot today where iPaaS providers have integrated tax calculations such as Avalara + HubSpot via tray.io
That might be worth running a trial, even if you end up coding the equivalent yourself, using your existing source of per-state delivery address tax calculations.