Tracking internet purchases to verify that I have paid applicable sales tax.

[John Morris]

Hi Michael,
  This is yet another reason I think GnuCash needs an orthogonal tagging system. Quicken offers a rudimentary such system with its classes, but GnuCash has nothing. To get around this deficiency, I place my tags in the memo or notes fields as appropriate and then use the grep search function to find the transactions of interest. From there, I can pull a report on the search results and export that report to Excel for massaging.

  As an example, I wrap my tags in forward slash characters (/) at the beginning of the field. For your example, it might be /Taxed/ or /Untaxed/. I don't do it, but you could assign multiple tags with some separator, such as a comma: /Taxed,Business/ or /Untaxed,Second House/. Any additional notes can follow the second slash. I like this system because GnuCash auto fills the last memo or note field as I start typing. For example, if I typed "/Unt", it might fill in "/Untaxed/Replacement 5/8 box wrench".

  It has occurred to me that I could use the Action field to the left of the memo and notes fields. An advantage of this is that I don't currently use that field for anything. However, it is somewhat limited because the field is so small. (Yes, I know I can change the field sizes, but then I would be making the Number field much larger than needed and taking space from the other, more important, fields.) Therefore, I have not pursued this avenue and don't know if it would work better or worse than my current system.

Best,
John

> On Apr 2, 2015, at 6:25 PM, Michael Wagner <mikepwagner at mikepwagner.net> wrote:
> 
> I would like to track internet purchases so that I can verify that I have
> paid all applicable state sales taxes for each purchases - but I'd also
> like to track those purchases in Expense categories that are not
> necessarily sub accounts.
> 
> 
> If I buy a wrench from a local store with a credit card, I credit my
> Liability:MasterCard account, and debit my Expenses:Hardware:Tools account.
> At some later date, I will credit my Bank:Checking account and debit my
> Liability:MasterCard .
> 
> So the cash flows from my Checking account to my MasterCard account  to
> my  Expenses:Hardware:Tools account. When both transactions have been
> entered, my Checking account has been credited, and my
> Expenses:Hardware:Tools has been debited, and my MasterCard account has
> been debited and credited in the same amount, and the balance is unchanged.
> 
> Maybe what I want to do can't be captured by double entry bookkeeping.
> 
> I'd like to create an "Expenses:Internet Purchases" account, and an
> "Expenses:Internet Sales Tax" account so at the end of the year, I can tell
> my home state, "I spent $10,000 on the internet and I paid  $400 on taxes
> for those purchases, so I don't owe you any taxes on those purchases."
> 
> But think that means that I would be double debiting both my
> Expenses:Internet Purchases account and my Expenses:Hardware:Tools  account.
> 
> If (for example) I try to do the following:
> 
> 1)  Credit my Liability:MasterCard and debit (in a split) and
> debit Expenses:Internet Purchases account and an Expenses:Internet Sales
> Tax.
> 2)  Credit my  Expenses:Internet Purchases account and debut my
> Expenses:Hardware:Tools
> 3)  When I pay the bill, credit my  Bank:Checking account and debit my
> Liability:MasterCard
> 
> That almost works, but after all transactions are entered, then I have
> debited and credited my Internet Purchases account, so it's got a zero
> balance. That doesn't help me.
> 
> If I create Expenses:Internet Purchases:Hardware:Tools   as a sub account
> of Expenses:Internet Purchases, then the total reported in the
> Expenses:Internet Purchases will be correct, but that means that I have two
> un-related accounts tracking tools I purchased locally and tools I purchase
> on the Internet.
> 
> Is there some simple way to solve this problem?
> 
> 
> Mike