Meeting with Eric. We were going over plans and cost/benefits of sales tax automation and integration. Eric, Steve, Cory, and Mike Roundtree had had some other meetings and Eric was reporting on what they covered. We went for a few rounds and talked about options and existing pieces. We are going to have to create some kind of custom hybrid solutions as this particular project doesn't have a straight one-to-one or one-to-many type feeder. It gets much more complicated.

We talked about using expense/receipts and custom expense types that will end up hitting and/or reducing the tax liability and the offsetting the sales tax aggregates (new table that sums up sales tax aggregates). We also spent some time talking about specific system generated expense types per corporation or globally set expense types. We are seeing a need for three such system generated expense types. They deal with reducing the sales tax liability (default), any transfers to revenue due to earned credits, and lastly any fees, interest, or penalties. If we can automate those three buckets (normal, earned credits, and fees) that would be awesome.

Eric and I talked a little bit about special accounts and how things like loyalty points are kinda like funny money (phantom type accounts - not really real or harder to put a direct finger on it). We talked about possible options of using a hybrid system like invoices and sales tax aggregates to build up the sales tax liability. Then using expense/receipts and special mappings to special expense types to help with the three known values that happen with paying for and/or accounting for sales tax. Once again, these three special buckets or expense types would be: A liability (still owed or taxes collected), amounts transferred to revenue (claimed as revenue due to credits, earnings, or discounts), and finally some sort of fee or penalty type amount.

For now, we are going to stick with what we know and start building in that direction. Before we jump to fully automated, we want to get the manual pieces in place and flowing in the correct manner. We talked about other new possible settings such as start dates, mappings to special expense types, etc. Lots of good ideas. The next step will be to put a plan together and then go from there. Good meeting.