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Subscribe provides three options for how it handles Transactions when your tax vendor is off line or otherwise unable to calculate taxes. You should consider balancing the risk of losing the customer or the revenue of a specific transaction against the impact of not collecting the appropriate taxes. Best practice suggests allowing the immediate transaction to proceed (see options below) and either filing/paying the uncollected tax or accepting a lower amount by paying taxes out of what was collected as if it were tax-inclusive. Vindicia can configure your merchant options to react in one of the following ways when a given transaction fails to calculate taxes:
  • Proceed with inclusive taxes (default)—the transaction will complete authorization, returning a 202 response code, and subsequently capture for the pretax subtotal only. The transaction will be posted to the configured tax service as a tax-inclusive event (similar to a VAT) instead of adding the tax to the price, so that the final price charged to the customer does not change, but you record a tax liability from the appropriate tax rate out of the collected amount. For example, for a single-item charge that would normally incur a 10% tax rate, a 10chargeismade,andtaxeson10 charge is made, and taxes on 10 transaction are filed as 9charge+9 charge + 1 tax (instead of a 11transactionfiledas11 transaction filed as 10 + $1 tax). This would be limited to transactions where the configured tax service was unavailable at the time the transaction was authorized.
  • Proceed without taxes—the transaction will complete authorization, returning a 202 response code, and subsequently capture for the pre-tax subtotal only. The Transaction will not be posted to your configured tax service. You will be responsible for handling tax filing on such charges (using the Subscribe report or API data to identify tax that was not collected).
  • Fail with error—the transaction will fail authorization with a 408 response code.
Note: The Vindicia Transaction Object will be flagged and reported in the “Tax not collected” field in the Transaction Detail Report to allow you to track when this occurs. For more information and to enable these options, contact Vindicia Client Technical Support.