RE: Scanning for similar cities

LOL,

Tax is one area I've spent a lot of time lately.... <g>  You've stepped into
one of the biggest messes around.

We used to maintain a database of all taxing jurisdictions, along with the
assiciated rates, but alas, there are too many overlapping jurisdictions
that it's almost impossible to get this right.  We use a software package to
handle our tax calculations now.

For each invoice, we determine the taxing jurisdiction of three locations
assiciated with the transaction: Ship-to location, Ship-From location, and
Order Acceptance loaction.  These three elements must be reviewed to
determine which jurisdictions take precedence.  Some states tax at origin,
others at destination, and sometimes, both jurisdictions...  Sometimes
special taxing districts exist for airports and civic centers...  In
city....  Out of city...

A taxing jurisdiction is associated with a "GEOCODE", which is based on
addressing information.  State, County, and City (zip code). This is
basically what you need.  I assume that the website is using some sort of
taxing software to tax the transaction.  Is it possible to have it return
the "taxing jurisdiction" ID that it used?  If not, you could perhaps get
better addressing details using the PER/Zip tool.  This API lets you
clean-up an address, and will pass back all sorts of useful stuff like
state, county, city, fips code, etc.  Perhaps you already have this
tool.....

hth,


Eric DeLong
Sally Beauty Company
MIS-Project Manager (BSG)
940-297-2863 or ext. 1863



-----Original Message-----
From: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of steema@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Friday, March 31, 2006 11:24 AM
To: RPG programming on the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Scanning for similar cities


OK this one is a bit wierd.

We get some web orders and the city field is sometimes including the
county, e.g. there is Houston, there is Houston Harrison. The harder cases
might be for a city that is made up of 2 names to being w/ such as San
Antonio.  I built a logical by city but in some cases it gets subdivided.

The only issue is, how does the program know that there is a problem?

The need is for summarizing state taxes, for those of you familiar, Texas
has separate tax codes by city and county.

The user does her tallying by city tho.