Oh dear, it turns out we don't get VAT back...

[Maf King]

On Wednesday 15 Jun 2011 17:07:52 edpsystems wrote:

> 
> Secondly, I went through the tax tables, changed each of the Tax Table
> entries for the 4, 8 and 18% Tables to zero (I'm in Spain btw). 

Ahh, hadn't realised that you were in Spain. Sorry, I had assumed that you 
were uk, so 20% makes things slightly easier than 4,8,18% 

> Then opened
> a bill, unposted it, said OK to resetting the Tax Tables, and once I'd
> reposted the bill the corresponding amount for that transaction in its
> expense account now appears as a gross figure, rather than net.
> 
> So Maf, your first guess may have been the right one! Let me just try a few
> more...
> 
> ...and it works as long as the gross amount was entered on the bill and the
> Tax Included? column was checked in order to calculate the net figures.
> Unfortunately, most of the amounts entered were net, and the Tax Tables
> calculated the gross amount.

Oh.  oh well!  You could always look at each line item and add the 4 or 8 or 
18% back on and get the gross for each line that way.  more of a pain I know, 
but at least you know by the relevant tax table what rate was deducted.  
Probably easier than going through the paper copies.  :-(

> 
> #4 raises a point I was wondering about a while back: The expense account
> only shows the Supplier name, not a breakdown of each item on the bills.
> Say I buy a tonne of biscuits and a tonne of bleach from Barry's Biscuit
> and Bleach Emporium, and I want to split the bill between
> Expenses:Groceries and Expenses:Cleaning Materials, post the bill etc, and
> look in each Expense account, I'm shown total spent at Barry's, but
> nothing more specific. Anyway, that's not the issue.
> 

That sounds odd. 
If you have entered the bill with 2 lines, one item going to expenses:biscuits 
and one to expenses:cleaning, GC should have recorded that as a split txn, 
from A/P to Exps:bisc and Exps:clea (and probably an auto-calculated Input VAT 
split too.)

If you look at the TXN from the AP account, then the basic single-line view 
will show the total owing to Barry, but from each expense account you should 
just see that subtotal for the relevant items.  Viewing the split should show 
all accounts & subtotals involved. (I use Auto-split and Double line views by 
preference, which definitely shows the invoice items as expected.) 

hope that makes sense!

> 
> So I'm left wondering if there's a way of entering net costs into the
> bills, and GnuCash calculating the gross totals without sending anything
> off to a VAT account. Hmmm...

Not AFAIK.  the Tax table sets the rate, and the account to use to aggregate 
all the VAT.  
You *could* have a whole load of VAT tables to calculate the rate and apply 
the VAT to the base expense account  (ie at least one vat table per expense 
category), but that would get very silly very quickly!

Maf.

> 
> Best regards,
> Stu
>