tax and reports on capital expenses

[Shane Litherland]

After several long days and nights, I haven't found a way to avoid a lot
of manual calculations and spreadsheets to get figures I need from
gnucash reports, but I have managed to refine the limitations I face in
the reporting (cf my previous verbose post)

In a basic scenario with split txns e.g.

>From accounts payable 	 $430 (total bill)
to expense:office	 $200 (taxable items)
to expense:office	 $100 (non-taxable items)
to GST account		  $20 (tax)
to private expense	 $110 (non-business amount*)

(*private includes a tax amount that is not part of business accounting;
which makes these items different in character from business items that
are tax-free.)
(Similar situations arise if the above figures had separate GST splits
i.e.
to GST:capital $10
to GST:non-cap $10)

I can get total amount when reporting on A/P.

I can get tax amount when reporting on 'GST', and can do manual
calculation to figure out amount of expense that was taxable (just
multiply the 10% tax amount by 10)

I can get private amount when reporting on 'private'

I can then manually deduct 'private', 'GST', [gst x 10 to equal taxable
expense amount] from A/P to determine the non-taxable expense amount.

I can get total expense when reporting from 'expense', but I cannot get
a report that shows just the taxable, or non-taxable amounts. Because
the filter does not 'look' at splits, I cannot report from the expense
account based on a filter to include/exclude GST account, as previously
noted. The only place I could apply such criteria is from the A/P
account, but the single filter of include or exclude is of no benefit.
an include results in the same as no filter and reports the A/P amount
whilst an exclude reports nothing. To make the include/exclude work
here, I would have to make a 'dummy' tax account of zero% tax, and any
non-taxable items have this tax charged. That way, a report on a 'zero
tax' account would list any items with a split to here. There would be
no values of course, but I would know which bills to go and manually
calculate figures for.

In this very simplified example, the obvious is just to use the tax
amount and multiply it back up, to get the missing figure. But in
practice, over the course of a year the account/s end up with GST
rounding adjustments, refunds, and a mix of txns with all-GST or
some-GST splits, so the end figure is not a neat 10% of taxable
expenses.

So I am still running reports on each account, then having to manually
identify adjustments and bills that were partially GST applicable, and
re-calculate figures to determine capital/non-capital expenses and
taxable/non-taxable expenses.

I previously suggested that having an option for the filter to be
'applied to splits' to allow a look-through approach (e.g. report from
expenses, where the expense entry has come from A/P but the transaction
includes a split to a GST account; If it applied criteria to splits I
could use GST account types to filter a report from expense accounts).
This probably would take one or two steps out of the manual
calculations, but regardless of that option or not, I think I must have
a 'GST-free' account for 'identifying' transaction splits that are
tax-free. Otherwise, there seems no 'marker' present to identify those
transactions/splits.

Thinking ahead somewhat, there may be room to advance filter/selection
criteria where gnucash is based in a database. I am familiar with a GIS
program (GRASS-GIS) where there are inbuilt basic filters or you can
type an SQL-statement that is run on the database. In this scenario, an
SQL-statement to pull up all those 'missing' amounts that are GST-free,
I could say:
SELECT * from expenses where [transaction total] > [GST amount x 10]
(and also exclude all private expense accounts)
which could then return everything where the bill comprised any amount
that was untaxable.

Food for thought anyway ;-)