Change in Dutch low rate from 6% to 9%

On the first of January 2019, the Dutch low rate goes up to 9%. This is not a change that is important to everyone: First of all, the low rate does not apply to all products, there is a high rate as well. And if you have B2B customers, a zero rate might be applied. However, if you do sell to end-customers directly, this change is vital for your business: You need to make sure your shop is reconfigured as soon as the change is activated by the Dutch government - on January 1st at 00:00 AM, right at the moment of the fireworks.

When do you make the change?

You could say that you simply wait. Let's wait until the morning of January 1st to make the change in your Magento tax configuration. But what if a customer orders before that time? Then the old rate of 6

Instead of delaying the change, you might also want to make the change right at 12 o'clock. See what effect this has on your social life. I can imagine the looks of friends and family.

Brexit? Other changes?

And you think you might only need this once a year or so. But what about an unfriendly Brexit, which might be sooner upon us than you think? And what about other changes, because some cuts enforced upon some European member? These changes are not all postponed until the end of the year.

How do you keep track of all these changes? And how do you manage updates automatically?

TaxRatesManager for Magento 1

For years now, we have managed an open online CSV feed for tax rates, that sums up all of the existing rates in EU countries. The CSV file can be downloaded and uploaded manually into Magento, free of charge. However, it is still manual work. For the Yireo shop, we have created some monitoring scripts to scan for VAT changes (using various other feeds) and correcting VAT rates in our shop automatically. We have poured all of this work in a ready-made easy-to-use extension: TaxRatesManager.

Fully automated tax change

And yesterday, we have published the Magento version 1 of this extension on our site. The extension is easily installed. And once installed, you can run test scenarios to see if a certain tax changes is applied in your shop correctly. And once confirmed, you simply activate the Fix Automaticall setting and are good to go.

We personally have implemented this extension in various customer sites as well, to make sure we can have a fun time at New Years Eve, just like you. The whole tax change is automated. To learn more about our Magento 1 extension, see the following page: yireo.com/software/magento-extensions/taxratesmanager

Magento 2 extension is underway

For Magento 2, the extension is underway as well: It will be published early next week, so that you still have plenty of time to implement the same logic in Magento 2 as well.

What are you doing during New Years Eve? Hopefully something fun. Rest assured, there is no reason anymore to manually modify EU VAT rates.