Location Types, Shortcuts, and Tasks

This topic describes Location Types, Location Shortcuts, and Location and Location Set tasks for Determination.

Location Types

One of the most significant components involved in any tax determination transaction is the location of the parties involved in the transaction.

In the US, each transaction involves up to five location types:

• Ship From: Where the goods came from prior to receipt by the customer (for example, a warehouse or store).
• Order Origin: Where the order for the merchandise was placed (for example, a store or a trade show).
• Order Acceptance: The location where the order was accepted (for example, a call center where an order was taken).
• Ship To: The location where the customer is receiving the merchandise (for example, the customer's address).
• Supply: For services transactions, the location at which the service is supplied.

Each of these locations may have an impact on the calculation of transaction taxes for a particular transaction.

In addition to the location types above, international transactions may also use the following location types:

• Bill To: A separate billing address for the customer.
• Middleman: The location of a middleman who handles the paperwork for the buyer and the seller in a transaction.
• Buyer Primary: The buyer's primary, or home, address.
• Seller Primary: The seller's home, or primary, address.

Location Shortcuts

To provide locations to Determination, you could supply the country, province, state, county, city, district, postcode, and geocode for these locations in every transaction. However, that approach can be cumbersome.

To simplify the process, you can define one of these location shortcuts:

• Locations: Individual locations can be defined and given names.
• Location Sets: A location set can include one of each type of your defined locations. When you create an invoice, you can specify that you want to use one of these location sets to set the correct locations.

For example, when Sample Parent Co ships widgets to the West Coast for distribution, they might always ship them from a manufacturing plant in Massachusetts to a warehouse in California (location set West). On the other hand, when they are shipped to a warehouse for East Coast distribution in Pennsylvania, the East location set can be used.

Location Set	Order Origin	Ship From
West	San Francisco	San Jose
East	Perth Amboy	Mendham

If you choose not to use location sets, you must pass complete location information in the transaction data from your business application.

Wherever location data is used, custom defined locations take precedence over predefined locations and predefined locations take precedence over location sets.

Location and Location Set Tasks