GST accountant questions (was Re: Inventory and GST)

[Derek Atkins]

Bret Busby <bret at busby.net> writes:

> On 23 Jun 2003, Derek Atkins wrote:
> > are you offering to create this plug-in system you propose?
> 
> It would be after August, before I could start to get involved in such a 
> project.

That's fine..  September would be a perfect time to start working on
it ;)

I certainly see no rush. :)

> If it is not started when I can become involved, I would probably like 
> to become involved in the creation of a (relatively) simple inventory 
> system integration, that can be used for both home inventory and for 
> business. That would, I believe, require two separate inventory modules 
> (although some may disagree with my perception of this); one for goods 
> held as assets (for home inventory, and for business assets), that could 
> include fields such as purchase price and (estimated) replacement cost, 
> that could be used for balance sheet reporting, apart from insurance 
> estimates, and, the other for saleable stock, which would require 
> slightly different fields, including more detail fields for stock 
> location, and, fields relating to taxes and retail, or, onselling (for 
> wholesalers), pricing, etc, apart from tax rates per stock line. The 
> assets type inventory system may be already in GnuCash, or regarded as 
> being present in GnuCash (I am not sure), but it would also need fields 
> such as depreciation rate (or appreciation rate) estimate fields, as 
> different items have different depreciation/appreciation rates, etc (if 
> it is not already there).

This sounds perfect!

No, Appreciation/Depreciation is not there.  Indeed, there is _nothing_
in there now that deals with "asset tracking" in any sense.

> As for the tax stuff; I have even a more fun (!) type module that I 
> would like to try to create - the specs would be a bit more stable than 
> the Australian GST requirements, but it would still be a bit difficult, 
> and the usage would be very limited.

Well, keep in mind we already do have "Tax Table" support.  This deals
with any flat taxrates you can come up with.  It cannot be used for
graduated taxes (which means it wont be directly useful for payroll),
however that's not important with regards to GST or anything like that.

IMHO the only "interesting" thing about GST is recognizing whether
something is taxable or not, and frankly I don't think that's a hard
problem.  At best we need a flag that says "this item is taxable"
and let the user DTRT.

> >From my understanding, from the website, data storage in GnuCash, is 
> primarily using XML file format, rather than PostgreSQL, so I would need 
> to investigate that. If inventory systems components of GnuCash, could 
> use Perl/PosgreSQL, that would be good.

Well, currently the primary data format is XML; that is being converted
(for the next major release) into an embedded-SQL system.  By embedded,
it means the SQL server runs as part of the application.  Unfortunately
PERL would not be possible, there are no PERL bindings to GnuCash.  You
would need to use some C and (if you wanted) scheme.  But not PERL.  Sorry.

The good news is that moving to SQL should make inventory a lot easier
to deal with.

> It is one of those things where, when I have the time, I would have to 
> investigate the programming of GnuCash, in depth, to see how it is done, 
> and, bring my skills in the necessary development tools, up to a good 
> enough standard; then, to start the process. Likewise with my other 
> half, if she would also get involved.

Well, the existing developers are always willing to help get people up
to speed.  Gnucash is programmed in C and Scheme (it's about 80/20 at
the moment).  You can avoid the scheme parts mostly, if you wish.
It's kind of hard to avoid the C parts.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available