Assignigng VAT values to accounts

[Michael Fair]

What we allowed users to go both ways?
Each transaction has a taxable flag,
a tax percentage override field (only settable
	if the transaction is taxable),
the whole account can be made taxable with a
	VAT for just that account,
and in addition the whole GNUCash application
	could by default apply a VAT percentage
	to each transaction.

This way, if you live in a country that uses
VAT you can set the global GNUCash field and
then override those rarer transactions that
don't apply, if you happen to do a lot of
business with countries that use VAT and with
countries that do not use VAT you would be 
better off using the per account defaults
and you can still override each individual
transaction, and if you live in a country that
doesn't use VAT you can leave all the default
VAT fields off and then override those few
(if any) transactions that require it.

Implementationwise, I would look at maintaining
a separate database per account that holds the
override information indexed by the transaction
id.  It seems to me that with the defaults set
up this way there will be few cases where someone
is manually setting the VAT for each transaction
and therefore it would seem a waste of space to
me to store "VAT percentage" fields for each
transaction even though they are hardly used.

A simple lookup table attached to the account (or
maybe even a global table with a good hashing
scheme) should be sufficient to track these added
properties that sometimes get used but more often
than not are left blank.

Another $0.02 for the finance manager.

-- Michael --

On 27 May 2001 15:15:42 +0200, Klaus Ridder wrote:
> It would be great, if some prior sort of VAT functions could be implemented
> very soon. Just take this example I currently have:
> 
> Domain Names
> |--x.com Network solutions, USA  (without tax)
> |--y.com Network solutions, USA  (without tax)
> |--x.de  NetBeat, Germany (16% tax)
> |--y.de  Netbeat, Germany (16% tax)
> 
> I simply cannot put them under one account "Domain names", because that way
> I don't have a possibility to make my VAT report correctly.
> 
> Do you have any idea how I could handle this? (I need to ddo the tax report
> in the very near future...)
> 
> Suggestion: Currently, the  {tax}  flag is assigned to any account I want.
> Wouldn't it be possible to assign a second flag, the percentage, too?  I
> mean, just as a "work around" solution.
> And implement another column to the VAT report: "percentage" and the
> calculated VAT value.
> 
> This cannot be _too_ difficult; I would do it myself if I could ... is there
> anyone who would like to implement that?
> 
> Klaus
> 
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