Hi Justin, you should keep replies on-list, others can contribute and maybe in the future the thread can save a question being asked in the first place.... "reply All" in your email client is a good way.
I think it is a bit of a technical distinction, GAAP left over from the days of paper books. Formally, expenses are a (set of ) temporary equity account(s) that should be closed (or zeroed) to a retained earnings equity account each year - to give a profit figure. whereas your earlier reference says that dividends are paid from a temproary equity account that reduces retained earnings. (sounds like an "expense" (english sense, not formal GAAP definition) to me, in that both sorts of payment reduce retained earnings - just that dividends are after the profit & tax calcs are done) Closing the books was important in paper days, not so much with digital accounts where the software can do everything quickly & repeatably., IMHO closing books isn't really needed any more, as long as you keep secure backups & reports etc for traceablity over the years. I have a part of the expenses tree that is something like "non-taxable". so expenses:non-taxable:dividends or :corporationTax etc. Easy to exclude the whole branch from reports rather than ad-hoc accounts. If you think that it is a bug / sub-optimal behaviour, by all means submit a bug report or RFE for the devs to comment on. They know far more than me about the GC architecture decisions etc. Maf. On Tuesday, 16 April 2019 12:21:52 BST Justin Mathew wrote: > Yes, that seems to be the only way now. Gnucash doesn't complain if we do > that way. And you're indeed lucky that you're accountant doesn't complain. > :) > > To think from a larger perspective now, I think GnuCash should to handle > dividends the right way; primarily because dividend isn't technically an > expense of the business and marking it as an expense will only create > issues later (eg, inaccurate certain expense reports, wrong analytics, > etc.). > > If this behavior isn't because of the way we (users) are doing it, shall I > notify in the development list to consider this as an error and correct it? > > > - > Regards, > Justin Mathew > mjus...@protonmail.com > > Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email. > > ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ > > On Tuesday, April 16, 2019 4:42 PM, Maf. King <m...@chilwell.net> wrote: > > Hi Justin, > > > > while it is contrary to the advice given in the link you supplied, I've > > always recorded dividend payouts as an Expense - but it is one of a > > handful that are excluded from the corporation tax calc, as they are > > declared after tax / from profits. > > > > My accountant has never complained - UK regs - YMMV, of course! > > > > Maf. -- Maf. King PGP Key fingerprint = 8D68 A91F 733B 2C1F 43B7 2B7C E591 E8E1 0DE7 C542 _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information. ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.