I want to track sales tax, but I also want the cost of an item to include sales tax - how?

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

jgombos <nabble.forum.jog at spamgourmet.com> writes:

> I'm interested in knowing how much VAT I pay, so I created Expense:Tax:VAT,
> and every transaction becomes a split transaction.  When I look at other
> expense categories, like Expenses:Food for example I see amounts less the
> tax.  
>
> Suppose I want to know the total food expenses including VAT.  I can't
> simply add the food balance to the VAT balance, because other purchases
> cause VAT expenses as well.  How can I accomplish this, without creating a
> separate VAT subaccount for every expense account?  
>
> I'm already expecting my expense accounts to turn into a colossal heap
> because I will need to create a USD and EUR subaccount for every account as
> it is.  Add a VAT account to every leaf node in that tree and we're talking
> hundreds of accounts just to track sales tax.  

Yep.  Sorry.  You just can't do what you want easily with the basic
tools of double-entry accounting.

You could do a query based on one of the accounts being the
Expenses:Groceries and then get a report to build the sum of the
expenditures.  I don't know if any of the existing reports would do
this for you...  MAYBE a "Register Report" off the query results?

> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
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