identifying sales tax

[Beth Leonard]

On Sun, May 15, 2005 at 06:08:01PM -0700, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> I have some mis-givings about this idea though. It creates a massive 
> amount of extra accounts just for tracking the sales tax. I think you're 
> better off doing the double entry idea:

Or another way is somewhat of a combination of other ideas, under
expenses, have main headings for different tax categories i.e.:

Expenses
Expenses:Not Taxable
Expenses:Not Taxable:Auto Repair
Expenses:Not Taxable:Utilities
Expenses:Not Taxable:Insurance
Expenses:Not Taxable:Food
Expenses:Not Taxable:Entertainment:Movies
Expenses:8.25 Tax rate:Computer Equipment
Expenses:8.25 Tax rate:Clothes
Expenses:8.25 Tax rate:Entertainment:Books
Expenses:16% Tax rate: Gasoline
Expenses:16% Tax rate: Tires

At the end of the year, generate an expense report for each
main tax category, and report 8.25% of that total.  It solves
the problem of having everything look like a split, and it
solves the problem of having an extra tax account for every
expense account.  It does add the problem that now it's harder
to total up "Expenses:Entertainment" as now various categories
of entertainment are under different tax categories.

I guess if you really needed to total Expenses:Entertainment,
you could temporarily assign a new parent account to get the totals.
Hmmmm.  That leads me to brainstorm yet another idea, if you do
define each of your expense categories to include only one tax
rate per expense category, you could just re-parent them at tax
time (or make a copy of your data and work with that), get your
total, then switch them back again so that "Entertainment:Books"
and "Entertainment:Movies" are back under the same heading again.

Ideally gnucash could offer several views into your accounts, so
that you could have the "tax time" parent accounts view and it's
associated reports be separate from the "budget" view and it's more
logical accounts and reports.  This sounds like something Neil would
have an intelligent comment on.
--Beth
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+                             Beth Leonard                          +
+       O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave              +
+       O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?        +
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