identifying sales tax

[Richard Gilligan]

bri wrote:

> how are people handling sales tax? now that the IRS allows us to 
> deduct sales tax on items purchased, i want to keep track of it. my 
> first take was to do a split - $x to the actual expense category, then 
> the $x that was the sales tax from the receipt. that would work great, 
> but then i got to thinking... that means that my totals in the expense 
> categories are 'wrong'. not that i'm overly anal about whether i spent 
> $100 on something or $108.25 but.... it would add up and does create 
> an inconsistency.

In addition to the expense account totals being not what you would 
want, the line item amount for each expense will not be what you 
remember paying.  Another annoyance is that the "transfer account" 
column will read "split transaction" for _every_ expense transaction 
(in basic ledger mode).

>
> so is there another way to do it? i looked briefly but couldn't tell - 
> can i do a report (i know.. i can probably write my own.. :-) that 
> pulls out all transactions/splits that have 'sales tax' in the 
> description? that way, i could still do a split, 1 w/ the sales tax 
> amount and the other with the rest of the price, both going to the 
> expense category, but the sales tax would be identified so that i 
> could run a report at the end of the year that would add it all up.
>
> thoughts? has anyone else solved this?

I decided to buy a spindle.  I "mark" the tax amount by spindling the 
receipt near it.  If at tax time it looks like 8.25% of my spending is 
more than the deduction I can get effortlessly by using the IRS 
allowance table, then I will bother to added up the sales tax.

Richard

>
> thx.bri.
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