2008-12-21 GnuCash IRC logs
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01:23:04 <warlord> joshua: No, there is no repository... In general any contributed report get's distributed with gnucash.
01:24:00 <warlord> As for the second question -- there's no way to differentiate a 'commission' expense from a 'tax' expense... But in general you might not want to have the tax witholding go to an expense account. Instead you might want to use a liability account.
01:24:25 <warlord> (or maybe an asset -- my brain isn't working this late)
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09:56:59 <joshua> warlord, I must have just missed you last night. I changed my accounts so that all taxes during the year go into a
09:58:23 <joshua> liability account. But I'm wondering why the method in the FAQ suggests having both a liability account and an asset account. They want the asset account used for when you are supposed to get a tax refund, but it seems to me that you could just use one account for both refunds and when you need to pay more.
10:19:44 <cortana> joshua: i believe it's down to 'how everyone else does it'
10:20:06 <cortana> e.g., for VAT in the UK, you send off a form where you have separate boxes for the amount of VAT you owe and the amount you are owed
10:20:22 <cortana> so in makes sense to track them as two accounts, one asset and one liability
10:26:43 <joshua> cortana, ok I see what you're saying. For me though (in USA) it seems like I could just send all Fed Income tax payments to one account (either asset or liability) and then settle up at the end of the year. As far as differentiating between a tax and commission expense it looks like, as soon as I sent taxes into a liability account, the report started calculating fees properly, even though I don't know why. But I have been trying to c
10:27:12 <cortana> you got chopped off after 'been trying to c'
10:27:50 <joshua> I should be less wordy: trying to create my own portfolio report for a while know and I've considered two ways of making the differentiation. One would be to assign the fee label to anything that is transferred directly to an expense account, and give the tax label to anything sent to a liability account - I'm sure there are lots of people that would have a setup that breaks this plan though (like maybe the one VAT system in UK). The o
10:28:18 <cortana> chopped again after 'The o'
10:28:30 <joshua> hmm... whats the word limit in these things
10:28:36 <cortana> might be 255 characters
10:28:41 <joshua> The other way I considered was to utilize the "action" box for every transaction in the account. So the report could just check for any transactions labeled "fee" - but I haven't figured out how to do that in the report yet.
10:29:00 <cortana> i can't really comment on how best to set this up though as i only use gnucash for my personal accounts, and in the UK income tax is much simpler
10:29:07 <joshua> I'm using pidgin, i wonder if there is a way to get it to tell me how much im typing
10:29:17 <cortana> there may be a plugin
10:29:39 <cortana> i have the feeling that the 255 limit is determined by the irc server, and there's no standard way to inform a client about it
10:31:08 <joshua> ah. I'll just limit myself to about three lines in the box.
10:41:17 <cortana> ok, i have a general question about taxes
10:41:27 <cortana> i'm reading the FAQ about GST which appears to be like VAT
10:41:57 <cortana> i don't understand why, when a company buys a chair, the VAT charged to them is not an asset
10:42:27 <cortana> as they will claim it back later on...
10:42:46 <cortana> unless it's recorded as a negative liability?
10:44:35 <cortana> then again, maybe GST is nothing like VAT :)
10:49:57 <joshua> are you looking at the 3-account format?
10:50:27 <cortana> yes
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10:55:24 <joshua> I don't have much experience with either GST or VAT but it looks to me like it may be similar to my situation. I don't see much of a difference between a negative asset value and a positive liability value for my purposes.
10:58:05 <joshua> I have been assuming that there would be very real concerns if you're a professional accountant or something, or if it's a business that has to report based on government rules, but for my home purposes, I don't see why you can't just record the temporary transactions in either one and then settle up at the end of the year by moving the extra or paying the debt into or out of an asset account.
11:00:00 *** warlord-afk is now known as warlord
11:00:12 <warlord> joshua: A = -L or L = -A
11:05:40 <joshua> warlord, so in the regular tax example it seems unnecessary to use an asset account AND a liability account just for taxes. In the GST example, it looks like they've used your equation and are just using one liability account whether its money you will get back or not.
11:07:48 <warlord> Well, it depends if you need to keep track of both types.
11:07:56 <warlord> If you do then you should use two accounts.
11:08:00 <warlord> If not then one will suffice.
12:05:59 <warlord> okay, gotta run.. later
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