Tariff Management With Sage 100cloud

The recent governmental activity has increased the likelihood that distributors who import goods from certain overseas countries will be assessed with a tariff.

While Sage 100cloud doesn’t have a native way to handle the tariffs your business may pay we have discovered the three most common methods consultants use to capture this new tax.

A tariff is a tax on imports or exports between sovereign states. It is a form of regulation of foreign trade and a policy that taxes foreign products to encourage or safeguard domestic industry.

Option 1: Use Sage 100cloud Landed Cost

The first option for managing tariff charges is to apply them using the native landed cost within Sage 100cloud.

Sage has a set of instructions on how to set up landed cost in Sage 100. This can be a quick and easy way to make sure all extra costs of import – including tariffs – are added to your product costs.

Using the standard Sage landed cost functionality you are able to allocate costs across your purchased items in one of four methods:

• Weight
• Cost
• Quantity
• Volume

Option 2: Use Scripting With Purchase Order

The second option which some companies have used is to create customization within their inventory items to:

• Add a checkbox for “subject to tariff”
• Add a field for “tariff percentage”

Then, using scripting, whenever an inventory item is placed onto a purchase order the system adds a separate miscellaneous code which contains the computed tariff for the line item.

Some companies have asked for this enhancement to make it easier to view the total tariffs charged.

Option 3: Use Scripting with Purchase Order and Sales Order

Lastly, a number of companies are using option 2 as well as creating a separate line charge on the sales order invoice to pass along the tariff amount to customers.

This separate line charge is similarly created using scripting which automatically adds a miscellaneous charge to any inventory item flagged as subject to the tariff.

The benefit of this method is the charge is separately stated so a customer can see that there wasn’t a random price increase.

Lastly, instead of using scripting to add a separate line item some users have opted to simply increase prices of the items subject to a tariff.

There are also various third-party solutions which can enhance the Sage 100cloud landed cost functionality.

No matter how complex your Sage 100cloud tariff situation, there are solutions – either built-in or custom – which can save you time processing shipments that include this new tax.

For more information on Sage 100 Tariff Management contact us here.