[Please CC any replies as I'm subscribed no-post] [Basically, this is a discussion about applying tax amounts to each individual transaction. If you're not interested, skip to next message.] Hi,
I've been wondering about tax support in GnuCash. At the moment it seems the only thing is this TXF stuff which basically works by getting the total of any income and expense accounts and reporting them. While this is appropriate for some taxes (like income tax) it doesn't work for others. As an example I'll use the GST (Goods and Services Tax) we have here in Australia. Basically it's 10% on almost anything. There was a mention over a year ago on this list about flexable features being added related to this but I certainly don't see any. http://www.mail-archive.com/gnucash-devel%40gnucash.org/msg06457.html At the moment it's something you have to do manually. It would be nice if each transaction could have a tax code and tax amount associated with it. That's the way it's handled in MYOB, an accounting package that's sold here. So you get transactions that look like this: (N-T = No-Tax, GST = 10%, TAX = All-Tax) Expense 120.00 GST -12.00 Bank Account -132.00 N-T 0.00 Tax Paid 12.00 TAX 12.00 Income -120.00 GST 12.00 Bank Account 132.00 N-T 0.00 Tax Collected -12.00 TAX -12.00 See how always both the total amounts and tax total balance? Anyway, I was thinking that since every country does this stuff differently it probably appropriate to handle this with simple scheme plugins that can be loaded. Each individual tax (generally) is simple, it's the whole setup that's complicated. Each account has a default tax code, though it can be changed on a per transaction basis. You also have to be able to fill in the tax amounts manually for some types as the GST is not necessarily 1/10th of the invoice. Is this feasable? I don't actually like the scheme above, it adds too many transactions to the Tax Collected account and also turns every transaction into a split transaction which is ugly. So I would prefer to not require the tax amounts to balance and have reconciliation transfers as separate transactions (such as at the end of the month). Keeps each transaction between two accounts and seperates out the tax payments. So you get: Income -132.00 GST 12.00 Payment from customer Bank Account 132.00 N-T 0.00 ----------------------------------- Income 12.00 TAX -12.00 Tax transferred as liability Tax Collected -12.00 TAX 12.00 ----------------------------------- Bank Account -12.00 N-T 0.00 Pay Tax Office Tax Collected 12.00 TAX -12.00 Keeps the amounts in the income account including tax, which I like, though the end result is the same. It does mean that the current amount of tax would have to be list as the balance is. Am I making sense here? Obviously you'd need some reports to take advantage of the details but it would be kind of nice. -- Martijn van Oosterhout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://svana.org/kleptog/ > Terrorists can only take my life. Only my government can take my freedom. _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gnucash.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
