California's New Sales Tax Rates
Require New DDMS Tax Districts

Wednesday, April 1, 2009 — As a California sales tax increase has taken effect today, ECi DDMS Support has received a number of questions about DDMS tax districts. There is one important thing to remember.

If your state sales tax rate changes, or if the rate changes for a particular tax district, you must create a new tax district on your system — you should not change or delete an existing tax district.

Your system recalculates the tax rate as needed, so the old tax district must be kept as is. If you credit an invoice, for example, the tax district used to create it must be unchanged, or the credit’s tax will be incorrect.

For dealers who operate a store in a state or district where sales tax rates are changing, choose the best course of action for your business:

• If you leave the State Tax % field blank in (LØ) Global Parameters, but do not use combined tax districts, see Changing Tax Rates for States or Districts
  (www.DDMS.com/Resources/Support/faq/accounting/tax-chg.pdf).
• If you use combined tax districts (including tiered sale price taxing, nesting combined taxing districts, and taxing single items at different percentage rates based on categories, see Taxing Enhancements
  (www.DDMS.com/Resources/Support/faq/customer/TaxTierCombo.pdf)
• If your situation does not meet the above conditions, call your ECi DDMS Support team for assistance.

Please note: You are responsible for determining exactly how the tax laws affect your business. Please consult your accountant and your tax authorities as needed.

Automating Sales Tax Updates With CCH Taxing Services

In DDMS 8.15 and higher, you can take advantage of the CCH Taxing feature, and use just the right tax rate according to your customer's tax jurisdiction.

The CCH Taxing Service provides you greater flexibility of maintaining tax information for customers nationwide — without having to do the state-by-state research yourself.

You can subscribe to services from CCH Group (cchgroup.com), to update your DDMS Server's tax tables on a periodic or monthly basis. The CCH Taxing feature allows you to set up individual items so that they can be taxed correctly by category, within each tax jurisdiction.

For more information on authorizing CCH Taxing and subscribing to CCH Tax Services, please contact ECi Sales (sales@eci2.com or 877-957-4672).

For detailed instructions, see your online help topic, "About CCH Taxing," under Customer Concepts (in DDMS 8.15 or higher).

REMINDER: U.S. Payroll Tax Tables Also Require Update

Speaking of taxes, there is a Making Work Pay Tax Credit in the Stimulus bill signed into law Feb. 17, which requires U.S. employers to implement new IRS federal tax withholding tables no later than April 1, 2009.

To reflect these tax changes, you must update the affected withholding amounts on your (L4) Federal Payroll Tables screen by Wednesday, April 1. To assist DDMS customers, we have published updated instructions.

See ECi DDMS News: Update Payroll Federal Tax Tables by April 1
(www.DDMS.com/support/massfax/ddPayrollTaxCreditStimulus09.htm) and the revised File #2: Setting (L4) Federal Payroll Tables for 2009
(www.DDMS.com/Resources/Support/faq/accounting/payFedTax09.pdf)

We hope this information is helpful!

Sincerely,
ECi DDMS Technical Support