Sales tax on split transactions

[Matthew Vanecek]

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Please post or CC replies to the list.

I still think, if you're hellbent on tracking sales tax, that you can
just copy it off the receipt.  I never get a receipt where the sales tax
is not printed on there (Credit Card slips don't count--you should still
insist on a regular receipt).  This convention may, of course, be
different in other countries?  In any case, you should know the sales
tax amount before you ever open Gnucash.

I know for a fact, if you're a business, you have a separate account for
sales tax.  Otherwise, your liable to wind up in jail, or
out-of-business, for non-payment or falsifying sales tax information.=20
It's different, however, because a business will only ever charge one
rate.  A consumer, on the other hand, can *pay* many different rates.=20
The only way to effectively track that is by entering the information
from the receipts.  I mean, from the sound of things, you are already
entering line items anyhow.  What's one more?

I personally don't care, and cannot see the use for tracking, how much
sales tax was spent on this or that category of expense.  If I wanted to
track it, all I would really want to know was, how much total did I
shuck out to the government last year?  A more minute level of detail is
probably beyond the scope of this application, as is a facility for
automatically calculating tax amounts based on provided rates.  A
calculator would do as well.

That's just my opinion, though--the developers may feel differently...

On Sun, 2002-12-08 at 16:10, deane@mjollnir.gooroos.com wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 08, 2002 at 11:28:36AM -0600, Matthew Vanecek wrote:
> > On Sun, 2002-12-08 at 04:42, Jochen De Smet wrote:
> > >=20
> > > 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)
> >=20
> > The problem occurs when you spend money on non-taxable items
> > (non-preprocessed food items, for example).  You don't want to apply
> > taxes to such items.  Much easier would be to enter a Split for the
> > sales tax as it is represented on the receipt.
>=20
> How about a function which lets you enter an amount, select a set of
> items/transactions and divvies that amount up among those transactions by
> value weight?
>=20
> For example, I go to the store and buy some salmon (food, not taxed) for
> $16.00, a Spider-Man DVD (sinful entertainment, taxed) for $24.00 and some
> batteries (probably for sinful uses, taxed) for $8.00.  The 7% tax on the=
 two
> taxable items totals $2.24.  I first enter transactions for the three
> items without the tax.  Then I go back and select the last two items (yea=
h,
> I know, you can't do multiple selection in GnuCash, so some other UI would
> have to be found) then select the 'Apply Weighted Adjustment' function.  =
It
> prompts for an amount and I enter $2.24.  It then sees that the DVD is 75%
> of the total for the two selected items, so it applies 75% of the tax
> ($1.68) to the DVD and the remaining 25% ($0.84) to the batteries.
>=20
>=20
> Note that this will only work when there's a single tax rate for all item=
s.
> Here in Canada we have two different taxes which we pay at point of sale:=
 a
> federal VAT (the 'Goods and Services Tax', GST) and, in most places, a
> provincial sales tax (PST).  GST applies to pretty much everything, but
> some provinces don't charge PST on certain items.
>=20
> So let's say that the numbers I gave in my previous example are all PST a=
nd
> that in addition to that I also paid a total GST of $3.36, which was levi=
ed
> on all three items.  If I first use the 'Apply Weighted Adjustment'
> function to add in the PST, then when I go to add in the GST it won't app=
ly
> the taxes correctly because the relative weights of the three items will
> have been skewed by uneven effects of the PST.  (In this case I could app=
ly
> the GST first, since it's effects are even across all three items and don=
't
> change their relative weighting, but that won't always be the case.)
>=20
> That could be fixed by allowing the selection not just of multiple
> transactions, but of specific lines within split transactions, and by
> having the Apply Weighted Adjustment create separate lines within a
> transaction, rather than just adding it to the total.
>=20
> So, it would work like this.  I enter the purchase of the salmon, DVD and
> batteries as three separate transactions, without the tax.  I then select
> the DVD and battery transactions (somehow), bring up the Apply Weighted
> Adjustment dialog, and tell it to apply a value of $2.24 using split lines
> with a memo of 'PST'.  Having done that, I switch the Register to split
> view, then select salmon transaction, the DVD line of the DVD transaction
> (i.e. not the newly-added 'PST' line), and the batteries line of the
> batteries transaction (ditto).  I then bring up the Apply Weighted
> Adjustment dialog, tell it to apply a value of $3.36 using split lines wi=
th
> a memo of 'GST'.  Voila, all of my taxes are properly applied.  It's a bit
> of work, but it doesn't require me having to do any calculations myself.
>=20
> It also has the advantage that it's not tax-specific: the feature could be
> used for divvying up any amount among a set of selected items.  Mind you,
> taxes are the only such use which comes immediately to mind.
>=20
> =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D
>   - deane                          Gooroos Software: Plugging you into Ma=
ya
>=20
>                           Visit http://www.gooroos.com for more informati=
on
--=20
Matthew Vanecek
perl -e 'print $i=3Dpack(c5,(41*2),sqrt(7056),(unpack(c,H)-2),oct(115),10);'
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*****
For 93 million miles, there is nothing between the sun and my shadow except=
 me.
I'm always getting in the way of something...

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