Tax-related checkbox

[J. Alex Aycinena]

> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 08:01:36 -0400
> From: Donald Allen <donaldcallen at gmail.com>
> Subject: c
> To: Gnucash User Forum <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
> Message-ID:
>        <d484362e0903240501u4f603ca3g22ecca76b4288b90 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> I'm aware that there was a previous thread on the greying-out of the
> Tax-related checkbox in the account-editing dialog. I just
>
> - updated to 2.2.9, courtesy Gentoo
> - ran across the greyed-out checkbox and had the reaction "Why can't I
> control 'Tax-related' for this account?"
> - remembered and reviewed the previous thread
>
> Would someone knowledgeable please explain the rationale for moving control
> of the tax-related atrribute to this new menu-item/dialog and leaving the
> checkbox on the account-editing dialog, greyed-out?

If by 'this new menu-item/dialog' you are referring to Edit->Tax
Options, that is not new. Previously it was one of two ways to set the
'Tax Related' flag, the other being on the account-editing dialog.
However, there was only one way to actually assign a "Tax Category' to
an account, and that was on the Edit->Tax Options dialog. To get any
usefulness out of the feature you have to actually do both: set the
flag and assign a category (and of course, run the tax report).

> It seems to me that the old way was fine and that this is a step backwards.

The problem before was that by setting the 'Tax Related' flag on the
'account-editing dialog' a user could easily stop at that point and
not realize that he/she still had to use Edit->Tax Options to complete
the process. In fact it was reported by a user as a problem. So a
'quick fix' was to change the tax flag on the account-editing dialog
to be display-only so that a user has to use the Edit->Tax Options
dialog to both set the flag and be able at the same time to select the
category.

Realizing that this might be a bit confusing two other things were
done: the documentation was updated to state that this was the case
and a tip was added to the greyed out tax flag on the account-editing
dialog saying this to the user (hover your cursor over the greyed out
flag for a second or so and it will appear).

> And, with this new method, I think the use of the greyed-out checkbox to
> indicate the presence or absence of the attribute is a particularly bad
> idea. The greyed-out checkbox is still grouped with the 'placeholder' and
> 'hidden' attributes that you can control from the edit-account dialog,
> suggesting that you can't control 'tax-related' for the account you are
> editing, which is not true. What is true is that we now have two methods of
> setting/unsetting account attributes, one for 'placeholder' and 'hidden',
> another for 'tax-related', without a suggestion on the edit-account dialog
> that that's the case. I understand the desire to indicate the state of the
> tax-related attribute on the account-editing dialog, but it should be done
> in a different manner than the 'placeholder' and 'hidden' attributes, since
> controlling the attribute is now done differently (e.g., "This account is
> tax-related" or "This account is not tax-related", no checkbox, not greyed
> out, and maybe a mention that the attribute can be changed via Edit-Tax
> Options).

You are probably right on the issue of how to display it; like I said,
it was a quick fix for a UI inconsistency that existed with the prior
approach. Please feel free to submit a patch to make a change if you
want to improve it.

> I do not think this is an improvement, in terms of ease-of-use and UI
> consistency, but perhaps there's a good reason for it that I'm missing, so
> I'd like to know what the thinking was on this.
>
> /Don
>

Well, you may be right looking only from the perspective of the
account-editing dialog. But from an over all standpoint you definitely
had a UI inconsistency between the two dialogs if you could do the
whole job on one and only half the job on the other and not realize
it. Same on the ease-of-use aspect.

If you use the US tax features, I would suggest two other things you
might want to do.

First, display 'Tax info' on your account tab (use the down-arrow on
the right to select it). This lets you see exactly which accounts have
been selected as tax-related and to which category they've been
assigned.

Second, the tax report in 2.2.9 has some serious deficiencies. The
report has been re-written; it's in trunk but has not been back-ported
to the 2.2 releases. You can get a copy from svn, rename your existing
copy (just to save it), and put the new one in the same place as the
old one (it has the same name). When you restart gnucash, it will be
used in place of the old one when you select the Tax Report from the
menu. (You can always go back to the old one by reversing this
process.) If you are interested in trying it and have any questions,
just let me know.

Alex