County Tax Zones & Exempt Status

This is two parts, the first being a fix for an existing issue and the second a question on still needing help. I purchased County Tax Zones by centrexity and was having problems trying to get it to work properly, and there has been no response for help by centrexity. I was trying to use it for Florida, and it would pull the county in the back end and I would enter the tax rates for those counties. When someone would try to check out, it would add the word county again and tell them the tax rate wasn't set up.

So for example, in the back end it would say Pinellas and I would put 1% in. So when I logged in, it would take my county and reassign it as Pinellas County, so in the back end, I saw both Pinellas and Pinellas County. I had to change the php files in the controller and add the word county to the end of each of my counties, thankfully I only needed to do this for one state. Then I had to change my view so that it no longer stated in the checkout, Pinellas County County Tax. All is well.

The problem I am still having at this point is we also have customers who are tax exempt. When going through checkout, they are marked as exempt from the State standpoint, but with the County Tax Zones add-on, I can't call out exempt status. I know enough to edit files to my needs, but I don't know the structure of how the exempt status works. I really need to look at status and if they are exempt and then also exclude county taxes. Is there anyone that can help point me in the proper direction?

I'm not familiar with the code of that extension, and there likely won't be many who can assist you here. If no one responds and you want to hire a developer, I recommend you post a request in the OpenCart "Commercial Support" forum (forum.opencart.com/viewforum.php?f=88), which is checked by a number of OpenCart developers. You can also try checking out the OpenCart "Partners" area (www.opencart.com/index.php?route=partner/partner).\

Also, if you end up not being able to get it to work, and are interested in another solution, I have a TaxCloud Integration extension that can limit the tax charged to particular customer groups. That way you could make the exempt customers their own group, and they wouldn't be charged any tax. Feel free to take a look at the screenshots and demo site, and if you're interested let me know at www.getclearthinking.com/contact if you have any further questions.

I'm still having this issue. In my XML file, how would I call out the Customer Group for the customer? This is the idea:

1. Customer goes to check out
2. XML file calls out customer group
3. If customer group is the designed Florida tax exempt group --> End XML
4. If customer group is retail and in Florida --> Continue