[GNC-dev] Automatically split transactions with sales tax

[David Cousens]

Geert,

Not all business sales/purchases are necessarily using credit for the purchase which is the main functionality of the
invoice/Accounts receivable -bill/accounts payable setup for businesses. Many businesses use cash sales and purchases
for incidental items and in some cases significant purchases. Most VAT/GST regimes require tax to be applied for all
sales. The difficulty for programming in GnuCash relates primarily in how does one identify that a cash sale or purchase
entered via a register is necessarily a taxed sale. In the case of a business most sales and purchases will be taxable
so if one had a user preference to make all transactions involving Asset-Expense and Asset-Income accounts auto
calculate tax based on the existing tax tables it would be feasible at least. 

In most businesses though, you would normally also be interested in how much money you are receiving/spending with
specific customers/vendors so in addition to just calculating the tax splits, a user would normally  want to associate
the transactions with a specific customer/vendor. Since that association in the current business features occurs through
the mechanism of the invoice record association to the transaction, not through the transaction record, this would
require significant changes in the current internal data structures to implement and underlies why it is difficult to
implement in GnuCash easily from the register. 

Another possibility might be to introduce a quick invoice initiation from a register that both creates the invoice and
the associated payment on the same date utilizing the current business data structures. It might for example be possible
to create a drop down list of frequent customer/vendors and only resort to the search procedure to populate the
customer/vendor information for less frequent customer/vendors This seems to occupy most of the effort in creating an
invoice. 

The perennial problem of course will be in finding someone in the development team who has the time and interest
combined with the necessary expertise who is not overcommitted to the existing priorities.

David Cousens

On Sun, 2018-11-11 at 12:13 +0100, Geert Janssens wrote:
> Hi
> 
> The fact you require to split sales tax suggests you're accounting for a 
> business in GnuCash.
> 
> For this use case there are the small business features. However these expect 
> you to enter invoices and bills. And for invoices and bills you can set up tax 
> tables that automatically calculate GST. It does come with the overhead of 
> entering the invoice/bill details, which is also more than you're willing to 
> deal with.
> 
> There's no way that I know of by direct transaction entry. That is aimed more 
> at personal accounting.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Geert
> 
> Op zaterdag 10 november 2018 22:09:51 CET schreef CHRISTOPHER PEARCE:
> > Hello all,
> > 
> > I would like Gnucash to automatically create a split transaction for sales
> > tax when a taxable product is bought/sold.  I deal with a lot of
> > transactions, and its a pain to manually enter the sales tax for each one.
> > I'd rather just work within the general ledger and have Gnucash do it
> > automatically.
> > 
> > For example, I buy a widget for $100 + 5% GST = $105.  I want Gnucash to
> > automatically create the split, and allocate $5.00 to the GST liability
> > account.
> > 
> > Of course, the ability to override the default 5% would be necessary.
> > 
> > Is what I'm asking for possible?  I'm not a programmer, so I realize this
> > may be a dumb question.
> > 
> > (Frist time on this mailing list, so apologies if I break etiquette)
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > Chris
> 
> 
> 
> 
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