Cbox Tax

cboxdk/laravel-tax assesses consumption tax — VAT, GST, US sales tax — on a supply or on a whole document. You send the facts of the sale; it answers with a treatment, a rate, the authorities the tax splits across, and the published source it came from.

The mental model

your app ──► TaxQuery ──► regime  (this package: place of supply, reverse charge,
                          │        registration, exemptions, rounding)
                          ▼
                      the register  (published data: rates, rules,
                          │          boundaries, provenance)
                          ▼
                    TaxAssessment

The engine owns the logic. The register owns the data. Neither crosses into the other: the engine never invents a rate, and no rate table decides whether a supply is a reverse charge. Both halves sit behind contracts, so a host can replace either.

The register is compiled to local disk by php artisan tax:data:sync and read without a network call — nothing is fetched while pricing. Jurisdictions come from cboxdk/laravel-geo, so a supply is placed against canonical ISO data rather than a country-name match.

Three answers, kept apart

The engine is built around a distinction most calculators collapse:

• A resolved zero — the place levies nothing, or the supply is zero-rated or exempt under a published band.
• A zero that is not yours to charge — a reverse charge, a marketplace's liability, or a country the seller is not registered in.
• Not determinable — an exception. No regime, no published rate, a rule the register says it has not modelled. Never a plausible number.

And between them, the honest middle: an answer that is probably right, flagged with what was missing and the one step that would close it.

Where to start