Kill Bill Simple Tax Plugin

This OSGI plugin for the Kill Bill platform implements tax codes with fixed tax rates and cut-off dates. Tax codes can be associated to products of the Kill Bill catalog, or specifically set on invoice items.

Tax codes can apply to “the whole world” in a single-country scenario, or they can be subject to some basic territorial restriction. Currently, they can be restricted to countries only, and this country must match exactly the tax country that customers accounts are decorated with.

Taxable invoice items then get properly taxed, with the applicable rate, as specified in tax codes. Regulation-specific rules can be adapted with custom implementations of the TaxResolver interface.

The typical use case for this plugin is a regulatory requirement for a bunch of fixed VAT rates that can change once in a while.

How it works

In this section, the explanations refer to the the example configuration below. You’ll need to take a look at it in order to understand how the plugin works.

Cutoff Dates

If you take the example of a “Standard” car in the “SpyCarAdvanced” example catalog, then the car rental service is subject to a 20% VAT rate in France. But this is only valid after 2014-01-01. Before that, from 2012-01-01 (included) to 2014-01-01 (excluded) it was a 19.6% VAT rate. (And before 2012-01-01, VAT was 20% but we don’t mind here. Let’s just say we need to deal with taxation for services that started being sold in 2013.)

To deal with that cutoff date (which is well known in France, but everybody around the world is not supposed to know, sorry for that), the example config sets up 2 tax codes: VAT_FR_std_2000_19_6% and then VAT_FR_std_2014_20_0% (Please note that the percent sign is just a valid character for a tax code label; it’s just plain text with no special meaning.)

If you dig into the details of the first one, you’ll see these properties:

[...].description = VAT 19.6%
[...].rate = 0.196
[...].startingOn = 2012-01-01
[...].stoppingOn = 2014-01-01
[...].country = FR

So the “startingOn” and the “stoppingOn” properly model the cutoff dates to apply with that tax rate of 19.6%.

If you read the properties of VAT_FR_std_2014_20_0%, you’ll notice that the “stoppingOn” cutoff date is not set. That’s because it’s the current rate to apply, and nobody knows yet until when. When the rate will change, the “stoppingOn” property will have to be set and a new tax code will have to be defined withe the same “startingOn” date in order to properly model the new rate.

This comes down to a very important principle in the simple-tax plugin: configured tax codes should always be considered immutables, except their “stoppingOn” properties which are the only one that might change over time.

Now imagine that our company has charged a car rental from 2013-12-01 until 2014-01-31 included. Which tax code should apply? Here the TaxResolver comes into play. Currently it just says: the end date should prevail. Here the end date is in 2014, so the new tax rate of 20% will apply.

Had we charged a “Standard” car rental from 2013-12-01 until 2013-12-31, then the TaxResolver resolution would have led to a 19.6% VAT rate because 2013-12-31 is in 2013.

Tax Countries

The “country” property of a tax code models a territorial restriction: the tax codes of the example configuration shall only apply to accounts that have “taxCountry” properties of “FR”. Any account with no “taxCountry” set or any “taxCountry” other than “FR” will not be elligible to any of these French tax codes in their invoices.

So, the current implementeation of territorial restriction has several limitations.

1. There is no support for retricting tax codes to territories that are subdivisions of countries. The only subdivision available is: country.

2. The country of tax codes must match the tax country of customer accounts. There is no support for customizing this in case any more complicated rules need to be implemented, involving for example a mix of customer location and product type. Here the TaxResolver interface might help, but it is meant to select applicable tax codes taking time into account, not the geographical location or product type.

3. There is no support for customizing how tax code country match the tax country of customer accounts. They must match exactly.

Configuration

Configuring the plugin

The configuration properties can be specified globally (via System Properties), or on a per-tenant basis. Here is an example setup for French VAT rates on the SpyCarAdvanced.xml catalog, implementing the cutoff date of 2014-01-01. You can find a much more detailed example configuration in eu-vat-example-config.properties.

curl -v \
     -X POST \
     -u admin:password \
     -H 'X-Killbill-ApiKey: bob' \
     -H 'X-Killbill-ApiSecret: lazar' \
     -H 'X-Killbill-CreatedBy: admin' \
     -H 'Content-Type: text/plain' \
     -d \
'org.killbill.billing.plugin.simpletax.taxResolver = org.killbill.billing.plugin.simpletax.resolving.InvoiceItemEndDateBasedResolver
org.killbill.billing.plugin.simpletax.taxItem.amount.precision = 2

# French tax codes (limited set)

org.killbill.billing.plugin.simpletax.taxCodes.VAT_FR_std_2000_19_6%.taxItem.description = VAT 19.6%
org.killbill.billing.plugin.simpletax.taxCodes.VAT_FR_std_2000_19_6%.rate = 0.196
org.killbill.billing.plugin.simpletax.taxCodes.VAT_FR_std_2000_19_6%.startingOn = 2000-04-01
org.killbill.billing.plugin.simpletax.taxCodes.VAT_FR_std_2000_19_6%.stoppingOn = 2014-01-01
org.killbill.billing.plugin.simpletax.taxCodes.VAT_FR_std_2000_19_6%.country = FR

org.killbill.billing.plugin.simpletax.taxCodes.VAT_FR_std_2014_20_0%.taxItem.description = VAT 20%
org.killbill.billing.plugin.simpletax.taxCodes.VAT_FR_std_2014_20_0%.rate = 0.200
org.killbill.billing.plugin.simpletax.taxCodes.VAT_FR_std_2014_20_0%.startingOn = 2014-01-01
org.killbill.billing.plugin.simpletax.taxCodes.VAT_FR_std_2014_20_0%.stoppingOn =
org.killbill.billing.plugin.simpletax.taxCodes.VAT_FR_std_2014_20_0%.country = FR

# Catalog Products

org.killbill.billing.plugin.simpletax.products.Standard =      VAT_FR_std_2000_19_6%, VAT_FR_std_2014_20_0%
org.killbill.billing.plugin.simpletax.products.Sport =         VAT_FR_std_2000_19_6%, VAT_FR_std_2014_20_0%
org.killbill.billing.plugin.simpletax.products.Super =         VAT_FR_std_2000_19_6%, VAT_FR_std_2014_20_0%
org.killbill.billing.plugin.simpletax.products.OilSlick =      VAT_FR_std_2000_19_6%, VAT_FR_std_2014_20_0%
org.killbill.billing.plugin.simpletax.products.RemoteControl = VAT_FR_std_2000_19_6%, VAT_FR_std_2014_20_0%
org.killbill.billing.plugin.simpletax.products.Gas =           VAT_FR_std_2000_19_6%, VAT_FR_std_2014_20_0%' \
     http://127.0.0.1:8080/1.0/kb/tenants/uploadPluginConfig/killbill-simple-tax

Configuring accounts

The plugin also provides the following REST endpoints to tweak taxation at the account level.

Assigning VAT Identification Numbers to accounts

The “vatin” endpoints allow assigning VAT Identification Numbers to accounts.

Method	URI	OK	Error Statuses
GET	/accounts/{accountId:\w+-\w+-\w+-\w+-\w+}/vatin	200	404: account ID does not exist for tenant
PUT	/accounts/{accountId:\w+-\w+-\w+-\w+-\w+}/vatin	201	400: when VATIN is malformed for sure (when VATIN cannot be validated, it is stored as-is) 500: when something went wrong while saving value
GET	/vatins	200	-
GET	/vatins?account={accountId:\w+-\w+-\w+-\w+-\w+}	200	400: when account ID is malformed

The base JSON payload for VATINs follows this structure:

{
  "accountId": "<UUID>",
  "vatin": "<VATIN>"
}

As a limitation, VATINs can't be deleted yet.

Assigning tax countries to accounts

The “taxCountry” endpoints allow assigning a two-letter country code to an account. Tax codes that are restricted to specific countries will only apply to accounts that have the same country codes for their tax countries. (And tax codes not restricted to any country are considered global; they apply to all accounts.)

Method	URI	OK	Error Statuses
GET	/accounts/{accountId:\w+-\w+-\w+-\w+-\w+}/taxCountry	200	404: account ID does not exist for tenant
PUT	/accounts/{accountId:\w+-\w+-\w+-\w+-\w+}/taxCountry	201	400: when tax country is malformed 500: when something went wrong while saving value
GET	/taxCountries	200	-
GET	/taxCountries?account={accountId:\w+-\w+-\w+-\w+-\w+}	200	400: when account ID is malformed

The base JSON payload for tax countries follows this structure:

{
  "accountId": "<UUID>",
  "taxCountry": "<2-Letter-Country-Code>"
}

As a limitation, tax countries assignments can't be deleted yet.

Forcing specific tax codes on existing invoice items

For existing invoices, the plugin provides REST endpoints that allow tweaking the tax codes that have been set (or not) to their items.

After changing a tax code of an invoice item, you'll need to re-run the invoice generation process. New tax items or adjustment items will be created accordingly to properly match the newly declared taxes.

GET /invoices/{invoiceId:\w+-\w+-\w+-\w+-\w+}/taxCodes
POST /invoices/{invoiceId:\w+-\w+-\w+-\w+-\w+}/taxCodes

GET /invoiceItems/{invoiceItemId:\w+-\w+-\w+-\w+-\w+}/taxCodes
PUT /invoiceItems/{invoiceItemId:\w+-\w+-\w+-\w+-\w+}/taxCodes

Payload structure for tax codes:

{
  "invoiceItemId": "<UUID>",
  "invoiceId": "<UUID>",
  "taxCodes": [
    {
      "name": "<code-1>"
    },
    {
      "name": "<code-2>"
    },
    ...
  ]
}

As a limitation, forced tax codes can't be deleted yet from an invoice item.

Upcoming improvements

1. Implement critical user stories for European VAT:
   • B2B that have a valid VAT number aren’t charged VAT
   • B2B that don’t have a VAT number are charged VAT at their local rate
2. Build a more comprehensive example configuration that embraces more European countries
3. Have the precision of tax amounts depend on the currency used
4. Have i18n for tax items descriptions

Building and Installing

Three Maven profiles are provided to help you build the plugin for various versions of Java.

mvn -P jdk16 clean package install
mvn -P jdk17 clean package install
mvn -P jdk18 clean package install

Then copy the resulting JAR to /var/tmp/bundles or any other value set in the org.killbill.osgi.bundle.install.dir system property.

VERSION=1.0.0-SNAPSHOT
bundles_dir=/var/tmp/bundles # or any other value set in org.killbill.osgi.bundle.install.dir
plugin_dir=$bundles_dir/plugins/java/simple-tax-plugin/$VERSION
mkdir -p $plugin_dir
cp -v ~/.m2/repository/org/kill-bill/billing/plugin/java/simple-tax-plugin/$VERSION/simple-tax-plugin-$VERSION.jar \
    $plugin_dir

Author and License

Copyright © 2015-2017, Benjamin Gandon

As the rest of the Kill Bill platform, this simple tax plugin is released under the Apache license.