Tax-related checkbox

Tue Mar 24 18:01:20 EDT 2009

On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 3:31 PM, J. Alex Aycinena
<alex.aycinena at gmail.com>wrote:

> > 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).

First, thanks very much for the detailed reply.

I see the issue now. My interest and focus was and is on the tax report. I'm
not interested in the .txf import, because a lot of my tax-related income
and expense items get imported (to Turbotax) from other sources. So while I
sort-of knew the tax categories were there (I think the last time I looked
at that stuff was when I first switched to Gnucash, in the 1.8.x days), I
had no interest in specifying them. So I had no occasion to use the Tax
Options dialog and didn't even know it was there, because the 'Tax-related'
checkboxes did everything I needed.

There's a virtue to the Tax Options dialog that I just realized, as a result
of reading your message and poking around in the program, and that is that
you can deal with aggregations of accounts at once, making them all
'Tax-related' of one flavor or another, something you can't do with the
account editing dialog. Nice.

>
> > 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).

The problem with that is that seeing the thing greyed-out, you have no
motivation to move the cursor over it, and so you don't get to see the
useful information the tooltip provides.

>
>
> > 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.

Ok, I will try to do so. I do think this needs improvement, though you've
certainly convinced me that there was a problem that needed solving. But I'm
still not completely convinced that greying-out the 'Tax-related' checkbox
from the account editing dialog is the best solution. For example, not
greying-out, but adding the tooltip might have been preferable. Thus, the
option to set 'Tax-related' with the default category (tax-report-only)
would remain available on the account dialog and the tooltip would alert
people who want to set tax categories that there's more to do and how to do
it.

Thanks again for the very complete and informative response.

/Don

>
>
> > 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
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