Sales Tax with GnuCash

[J. Anthony Hertzler]

Hey, I really appreciate all the time you took to help me out on this. It
turns out I can even give back a little, since in trying to implement a
second-best solution, I stumbled upon the very function I was looking for.
It's not intuitive to find but it's simple and works perfectly. Here's how
to do it:

In Business>Tax Table Editor, as you pointed out, you can create a tax table
using the New button under Tax Tables and later edit the entry by clicking
the Edit button under Tax Table Entries. To create a tax table to direct
taxes to several liability accounts, simply create a new tax table, name it,
(Oklahoma-Delaware Co in my case) and enter the percentage and the
appropriate account for one of the entities to whom tax is owed (I entered
4.5% and the account Liabilities:Sales Tax:Oklahoma). After you click OK,
the name of the liability account you entered appears under Tax Table
Entries. With the same tax table still selected (Oklahoma-Delaware Co), you
can then click the New button under Tax Table Entries, which will open a box
that allows you to enter another percentage and another account (I entered
0.9% for Liabilities:Sales Tax:Delaware County). After that, choosing the
Oklahoma-Delaware Co tax table when creating an invoice neatly adds the 5.4%
tax to the invoice total and divides it between the relevant liability
accounts. I'm all smiles.

Again, thanks for your time. This definitely is a gap in the documentation
that will need filled, but the functionality seems perfect.

On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 12:09 PM, Pablo Francesca <rshgeneral at yahoo.com>wrote:

> I figured you would want to know how to do that after I thought about your
> question some more.  Again, I'm not a gnucash pro, and the my quick answer
> is that what you want to do cannot be done without programming.
> You can have many different tax tables, but I don't believe that you can
> have multiple tax tables per line item on your invoice, which it what it
> seems you want. So I can say confidently that you could have many different
> sub accounts under Sales Tax to distinguish how much each municipality is
> taxing in total, but this is not what you want.  You want one account for
> state sales tax, and one account each county tax,and one account for each
> city tax.
> There is an awfully nasty solution, that I thought about telling you about,
> but I didn't like it, I was hoping someone with more experience would be
> able to help.
>
> The solution would involve lots of simple transactions at the end of the
> month, (which is why it would be perfect for a programming solution).  Since
> you know the total tax rate for each tax table (i.e. municipality), you can
> derive the state and county portions and then move those sums into other
> Sales Tax accounts.  For example, suppose you find you have a total of 200
> dollars in State1-County2-City3, and you know the total tax rate for this
> account is 4 (state), 1 (county), 0.5 (city) for a total of 5.5 percent.
> Well 200/.055 would give you a total sales volume of 3636.36.  So then you
> would know that the state portion is 3636.36 * .04 = 145.45 and that the
> county portion is 3636.36 * .01 = 36.36.  Since you would have your totals
> you could then just move the relevant amounts into their own accounts.  Its
> solutions like this that would kinda make you long for Quickbooks.
>
>
> --- On *Tue, 12/15/09, J. Anthony Hertzler <plant.sequoias at gmail.com>*wrote:
>
>
> From: J. Anthony Hertzler <plant.sequoias at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Sales Tax with GnuCash
> To: "Pablo Francesca" <rshgeneral at yahoo.com>
> Date: Tuesday, December 15, 2009, 10:18 AM
>
>
> Thank you for your clear and understandable explanation. The setup you
> describe will probably work for me at this point, but I'd like to know how
> to fine-tune it a little more. At the end of the month when I pay sales tax,
> I need to have records not only for the total tax owed, but also separate
> totals for the state, each county in which sales were made, and each town in
> which sales were made. Is there a procedure that would allow me to subdivide
> the Sales Tax account into state, county, and city accounts and divide the
> tax liablity correctly among them based on which State-County-City tax table
> I applied. For example, say State tax is 4.5% and I make a sale in a county
> where tax is 0.9%. Rather than just having 5.4% credited to the Sales Tax
> account, I want to be able to choose the appropriate tax table and credit
> individual sub-accounts for the state and county within the Sales Tax
> account. What's your best suggestion on how to accomplish this in Gnucash?
>
> Thanks again for your time and assistance.
>
>
>