Tax&Co

[Andreas Leitner]

Hi,

I just read through the GnuCash docs and experimented a bit with it. You
guys did a real great job. The software looks awesome!

Now, me beeing a Telematics stundent and spare time SW freelancer, I
have no clue about account keeping - and surprise surprise I have no
clue how/if I can do certain things with GnuCash. Maybe somebody on the
list would care to help a poor technichian (;

Here is how my income flow works:

1) I do something
2) Issue an invoice (by writing a simple xml file I designed which holds
customers address and invoice items. then a small script generates the
bill from that, it even calculates the tax for me (which is simple, just
add 20%) - generates latex, then pdf and this i send to my printer)
3) The customer pays the invoice and the money gets transfered to my
buissness bank account

Here is how my (tax)expens flow works:
1) Every quater I go with all my income and expense bills to a very nice
tax consultant who then tells me how much UST (Umsatzsteuer in German) I
have to pay to the gvmt
2) Every year I go to the same person with all my expense bills to the
same consultant again with all my income/expense bills and she tells me
how much insurance and tax (if any) I have to pay

How can I best model this system with GnuCash? What I would like GnuCash
to report me is:

1) How many Invoices have not been payed yet? The Documentation has a
very nice page on this (Accounts Receivable). Done
2) How much tax do I have to pay worst case next quater (if no expense
bill will be taken into account)
3) How much tax am I probably going to pay - I really never know wheter
this expense bill can be excluded from tax or not and if can i use the
whole amount - there is a lot of black magic involved.

Now what I did is set up a simple test account layout:
*) Banks (type bank)
**) Income Account (where all my customers pay there bills to) (type
bank)
**) Spending Account (for all other things, which is per usually
spending money :) (type bank)

*) Income
**) Company A (all invoices send to company A) (type income)
**) Company B (all invoices send to company B) (type income)

*) Accounts Receivable (where amounts are transfered from to the
according Income account) (type asset)

Once Company X pays an invoice, I would transfere the amount from the
according Income account to my Banks:Income Account.

Now, for taxes, I don't know what to do. I have tried two things (lets
keep things simple and say i only have to pay a one kind of tax, which
is afixed % of my income - would suffice for worst case):
1) create a seperate subacount whose parent is the root node called
taxes (type expense)
	Ok, now I would need for every transfere from "Company x" to "Income
Account" create a new transfere from "Income Account" to my tax account,
which a fraction of that ammount. But now the total of my bank account
cannot possibly be the same total as my bank account has in real life
(since this transfere does not happen in real life) - this cannot be,
can it? 

2) create a tax account as child of my income bank account (type
expense)
	Does not work, GnuCash does not allow me to create "Expense" account as
child of a bank account

hmmm, I am clueless (;


many thanks in advance and keep up the great work,
Andreas