Automatically split transactions with sales tax or VAT (Value added tax) when a transaction is booked to an sales or value-added-tax related account

[Oliver König]

On Thursday 16 November 2006 10:47, Nigel Titley wrote:
> Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> > On Tue, Nov 14, 2006 at 11:35:17AM +0100, Oliver König wrote:
> >> Hello,
> >> I have posted two feature request for GnuCash at bugzilla:
> >>
> >> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=364378
> >> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=371581
> >>
> >> Both feature requests are actually just one feature request. The first
> >> one describes the problem for users of GnuCash in countries who have got
> >> a Value added tax (e.g. Europe, etc) and the latter one for those
> >> countries with
> >>
> >> sales tax (e.g. USA). However the feature is the same in both cases:
> >>> Example:
> >>> Let's say an American supermarket sells a t-shirt for cash 10.00 US$
> >>> (net), 11.00 (gross). The sales tax (sales tax 10%). .
> >>> The supermarket accountant enters a new split transaction in GnuCash:
> >>>
> >>> Bank(+) 11 -> Sales (+) 10.00
> >>>                     -> Sales Tax(+) 1.00
> >
> > this implies that you are using gnucash as a point of sale system,
> > which I think it was not designed to do. It is fairly typical, I
> > think, to split the operation of the point-of-sale system from the
> > accounting system, although they can certainly be linked and talk to
> > each other in some manner. I believe it to be excessive to enter EVERY
> > sales transaction into gnucash (in my business, that would be upwards
> > of 200 transactions per day!). rather, we track the individual
> > transactions in a system designed for that and we use gnucash to enter
> > receipts totals for the day/week/month whatever. this means we have
> > only one split transaction for the period in question.
> >
> > I am not, by any means, telling you how to run or account for your
> > business, just my opinions on why this feature is not necessary for
> > gnucash. Even a simple spreadsheet, with the appropriate formulas
> > built in to it would probably be easier than using gnucash directly.
>
> Well, this is the route I'm thinking of going down. My point of sale
> system does indeed keep track of individual transactions and I will
> probably write a daily totalling system once the level of transactions
> reaches manually unmanageable proportions. There is the minor issue of
> keeping the three types of VAT transactions seperate but I'm sure that
> if I sit down and think about it, the necessary information is sitting
> in the POS system.
>
> I do see Oliver's point, about using the direct debit facilities of the
> on-line banking system, but in my case this doesn't apply, although I do
> have the issue of manually matching up payments that my credit customers
> make direct into my bank account with their bills. However, at the
> moment they are a small proportion of my sales, so quite manageable.
Further I have got a lot of customers who pay by bank transfer. When I 
download those transactions from my bank with GnuCash / aqbanking  I have to 
split each of these transactions manually.

-- 
Oliver König

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