Tax-related checkbox

[J. Alex Aycinena]

On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 3:54 AM, Donald Allen <donaldcallen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 1:10 AM, David T. <sunfish62 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>> Don--
>>
>> I was referring to the report entitled Tax Schedule Report & TXF Export,
>> listed as a top-level report on the Reports menu. I assume we're talking
>> about the same report; it's the only one I see like it. I explained that the
>> underlying problem I encountered was that the report returned NO account
>> information at all unless I used the Edit->Tax Options window. I got an
>> empty report, like:
>>
>> Taxable Income/Deductible Expenses
>> Period from 2006-Jan-01 to 2006-Dec-31
>> All amounts in USD unless otherwise noted
>>
>>
>> Selected Report Options:
>>     Subset of accounts
>>     Do not suppress $0.00 valued Tax Codes
>>     Display full account names
>>     Display all Transfer To/From Accounts
>>     Do not Print TXF export parameters
>>     Display Action:Memo data
>>     Display transactions for selected accounts
>>     Include some transactions outside of selected dates
>>     Shade alternate transactions
>>     PriceDB lookups nearest to transaction date
>>
>> There was no indication of the accounts anywhere in the report. Exporting
>> in TXF or HTML never played into this, since I didn't have anything to
>> export in the first place.
>>
>> It is possible that this is only a problem with Alex's version of the
>> report,

Yes - what you are referring to above is the new version of the
report. However, under the condition where there is no account flagged
as tax-related the new report, like the old report, prints a message
to that effect and directs the user to use Edit->Tax Options to set
the flag and assign tax categories. You might be referring above to
what you saw in an earlier version of the new report.

>
> I certainly didn't experience that behavior with 2.2.7, which had the
> Tax-related checkbox enabled. If I checked Tax-related in the
> account-editing dialog, the account would appear on the Tax Report (in
> black, so would not have been exported had I done a TXF export). I'm
> suggesting that we go back to that, but retain the tooltip or some other way
> of alerting people that if they want to set tax categories in order to use
> TXF export, they need to go to Edit->Tax Options.
>
> /Don
>

The problem was that before, when you checked the tax-related flag on
the account maintenance dialog, it didn't set a default; if you
checked it through Edit->Tax Options, it did. The old (current) report
presents tax data in an account hierarchy format with no tax category
information provided; the only way you saw the tax category view was
through the export in your tax program - no audit trail of any real
value. It also has a number of other serious problems. The new report
(in trunk, not backported to the 2.2 series) presents the data sorted
by tax category so you can see what the export will be before you
actually do the export. It also provides a complete audit trail for
the amounts for each tax category all the way back to the transaction
deatil and even including currency conversions, if applicable. Even if
you don't actually do an export to a tax program, this is a much more
useful view. In the old report, if an account was flagged but no
category was assigned it probably didn't matter since it could be
included and properly displayed due to the account hierarchy format it
presented (I don't actually remember exactly how it handled this case
and can't test it since I can't set that condition any more due to the
greying of the flag). With the new report, an account not assigned to
a meaningful tax category is useless so an account with either the
flag set and no tax category assignment (like would happen through the
account maintenance dialog but can't now) or with the flag set and a
default category (as can happen now if you just check the flag but
don't actually bother to make an assignment in Edit->Tax Options) is
equally bad.

So Don, while you certainly can improve how it is presented/displayed
etc. in the account edit dialog, changing it so that you can set the
flag and then having it just set a default category seems to me like
it would be effort with no return. Having the flag open the Tax
Options dialog would be more involved but make more sense. Just
changing the presentation on the account edit dialog to make more
sense and to clearly direct people to the other dialog might be the
easiest thing to do that adds value.

I suggest you download and look at the new report before making any
changes. If you download and build trunk, it's there. Alternatively
you can easily just download the report and temporarily replace the
existing one in your current release of gnucash to check it out.

>>
>> rest of message snipped