On 2024-03-08 08:27, Alan Johnson wrote: > Please refer to the attachments. One is the Amazon invoice for an order. > This order is for Florida with a 7.5% sales tax. > > It contains 3 items, 4.99, 34.99, and 7.99. > > This subtotals to 47.97. > > 47.97 *.075 = 3.5955 according to my handy calculator. > > Amazon charged me $3.59 for sales tax. > > Gnucash calculated the sales tax (through the Vender -> bill interface > at 3.60. > > An adjustment was required to make the gnucash entry match the actual > bill from the vendor. (-.01 to sales tax).
Thank you for providing specifics. That's helpful. By the way, either your calculator or mine has a problem. I get $47.97 subtotal as you do, but my TI-84 Plus CE computes .075 times that as 3.59775, not 3.5955. That doesn't affect your main point, since either figure rounds to $3.60. $4.99 * 0.075 = 0.37425 --> $0.37 $34.99 * 0.075 = 2.62425 --> $2.62 $7.99 * 0.075 = 0.59925 --> $0.60 However, $0.37 + $2.62 + $0.60 = $3.59. This is consistent with a hypothesis that Amazon computes tax on the individual items and adds the tax amounts to get total tax. I'm sure it doesn't do that for me (I live in California), and neither does Costco or any other vendor I've dealt with that was large enough to use POS software. The first explanation that springs to mind is that Florida requires, or at least allows, computing sales tax on individual items rather than on the taxable total. I did a little googling and confirmed this, on page 5 of <https://floridarevenue.com/forms_library/current/gt300015.pdf>, which says: "Dealers must calculate the total tax due on each sale. The tax must be shown separately on each invoice and may be calculated on either the combined taxable amount or the individual taxable amounts on an invoice." I've no idea why Amazon chose the individual item method when its invoice shows only a total tax amount, but it looks like that's what happened. In this case, it actually saved you a penny. In any case, it looks like Amazon is within the law of your state. Another possibility you might consider: For that 1-cent adjustment, in your place I just drop the price of one item by 1 cent to make everything come out consistent with the vendor. (I'm not using tax tables, but enter prices directly as $XX.XX*1.0825, so a one- or two-cent difference at the end is not unusual for me.) It's a matter of personal preference, but I don't have an Expenses:Sales Tax account and therefore I'd have nowhere to post that tiny difference. As for a GnuCash error, I don't see one here. GnuCash used a legally acceptable method to calculate sales tax; it just doesn't match the legally acceptable method that Amazon used. You could file a GnuCash enhancement request asking for the tax tables to include "tax by item" or "tax by subtotal". Or you could ask Florida to mandate one method or the other, not allow both. :-) Stan Brown Tehachapi, CA, USA https://BrownMath.com > On Thu, 2024-03-07 at 10:18 -0800, Stan Brown (using GC 4.14) wrote: >> On 2024-03-07 06:56, Alan Johnson via gnucash-user wrote: >>> Having entered numerous bills from Amazon and Costco recently, there >>> have been a few cases where the sales tax did not match. This required >>> an additional line item to adjust the sales tax to make the totals >>> match. >> >> I'm not quite clear on what you mean by "do not match". >> >> If you mean that you computed the sales tax for each taxable item, added >> your computed tax amount, and found that the sales tax charged was >> different, that's because in many (?most) states with sales tax, the tax >> is computed, by law, on the total of the taxable items, not on the >> individual items. >> >> Like you (if that's what you're doing), I include sales tax as part of >> the cost of each taxable item, and then I do sometimes find that my >> total tax is a penny more or less than the tax on the receipt. It's not >> a "vendor software problem", but the mathematical issue that Michael >> Novack alludes to. >> >> If that's not what you're doing, what exactly is not matching to what? >> >> Stan Brown >> Tehachapi, CA, USA >> https://BrownMath.com <https://BrownMath.com> >> _______________________________________________ >> gnucash-user mailing list >> gnucash-user@gnucash.org <mailto:gnucash-user@gnucash.org> >> To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: >> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user >> <https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user> >> ----- >> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. >> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All. _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
