This was a geeky thing to do, but it was fun.
It was a dark and stormy lunch hour in 2018, the perfect weather to bring in lunch, which we did.
Somebody was discussing the issue of Sales Tax collection and the recent Supreme Court decision on South Dakota v. Wayfair. Wayfair may have what you need, but they certainly didn’t this decision. Now companies that sell via the internet had to collect sales and local taxes. No problem, right? Wrong. There were about 10,000 problems, and each one was a specific taxing authority in a specific state.
Hmm, someone wondered, could there be a way to get a listing of all those 10,000 sales tax locations?
The last one to find them is a rotten egg. Within 20 minutes, we found a cache of all those taxing authorities and were able to download the entire bunch. Next, we devised a way to build a matrix of them, and within 24 hours, we had the entire subprogram loaded up into Plus & Minus for our users to use, just in case they wanted to do e-commerce across state lines. The cost to our users? Like the spaghetti sauce Prego, it’s in there! No problem.
