Germany plans to reduce their VAT from 19 to 16 % from July to December....

I'd guess a lot of old legacy projects will be fucked.

Anyone else remember the fun when you had a project where the VAT was hardcoded....everywhere.... And needed to be migrated?

I had two or three of those... God I'm so happy that I don't work for these companies anymore.

And I guess.... A lot of schadenfreude ... Cause I remember the pain, especially database wise.

Hardcoding will kill you every time. Configuration, configuration, configuration.

Also, I know where I'm going for post corona drinks!

Such things always have chances to change in weeks, months year or decades at some point. Hard coding with the belief that this will never change is going to cost you a lot of donkey work later where you will be changing those values in many places.

And even if the system lets you define your tax rates, I think only a handful of them let you a define a "valid from / to" period.

Well, fuck!

About time that dumbshits who think that technical debt can just be ignored forever to get a quick buck get the consequences shoved up theirs.

Had leadership like that once. Jumped ship asap - one of the best decisions I ever made.

Hardcoded tax values..

@pythonInRelay That's not legal in Germany, you must show the price including VAT if you sell to consumers.

And it's very stupid to hardcode anything like that, also some items are taxed 7% or 0%.

Consider the cost of changing the VAT. Politics, organization, all the software changes. People that need to be payed to make these changes...

This might cost more than the total amount of money "saved" by the reduced VAT.

I know that it doesn't matter but it's funny to think about it.

I am fucked I guess... wish me luck

@pythonInRelay this is not at all how VAT works. It would make zero fucking sense for the payment provider to have ANYTHING to do with VAT. vAT gets charged by the business in response two a few variables such as destination country and product type. And ALL small businesses (except those that are VAT excempt) have to understand this themselves. Otherwise it's a tax penalty just waiting...

@pythonInRelay Out of curiosity... Where are you from?

I really never heard of a country without VAT.

Taxes are really different from country to country, but it's important for companies to track the taxes. It's not only a legal thing - it's important for the company, too. Without storing taxes and net -/ gross data, you really can't do proper planning or generate statistics. Stuff even get's funnier when it's international.

Accounting for imports from foreign countries is really ... really.... frigging hard.

(Anti dumping, transport fees, document fees, conversion of units, exchange rates, proper rounding, ... And so on. I once had an Excel Sheet with > 100 single points and an additional Power Point presentation to explain the details )

This makes me smile in pure joy.