Sales tax on split transactions

[Jochen De Smet]

I don't need GNUCash to make the decisions as to
what to tax and what not for me, I'd just like some
option to make it less work :)

One possibility would be to have an option in the
right-click menu of an entry on a split transaction
that says "Add tax line" which would ask for a percentage
and fill in the rest of the fields by itself. (Ideally
there would be a place to enter one or more percentages
that could then be selected directly from a submeny)

I've considered setting up a seperate account for the tax
but decided against it. For certain expenses like restaurant
bills i only record the total amount. If i would put the
tax for other accounts outside those accounts it would skew
the expense pie charts.

Which does touch another wishlist item though. It would indeed
be nice to know how much i spent on tax, even if the tax entries
are spread out over several expense accounts. Maybe there could
be something like a virtual account. It would be read-only and
would not count in any calculations, and it would contain all
entries from other accounts that match a certain set of conditions.

J.


On Sun, 2002-12-08 at 04:54, David Hampton wrote:
> On Sun, 2002-12-08 at 00:20, Jochen De Smet wrote: 
> > Is there an easy way to split up the tax as well,
> > without having to calculate the tax manually for
> > each line?
> 
> No. Its not a trivial problem. There's no easy place to put a flag and
> say "add tax for any number applied to this account".  The rules for
> what is taxed and what isn't vary not only from location to location but
> also from item to item.  For example, I go to the grocery store and buy
> a six-pack of Coke and a 1/2 gallon of milk. I consider both those items
> to be groceries and would apply the expense to my Groceries account, but
> the state of California has decided to tax one of those items and not
> the other.  The only real way for gnucash to handle this is manually.
> 
> David
> 
> P.S. You could always create an Expenses:Sales Tax account and apply all
> the sales tax there.  Might even be eye opening to see how much sales
> tax you pay over the course of a year.
-- 
Jochen De Smet <jdsmet@yucom.be>