I imagine I am looking at this wrongly.

Robert Heller heller at deepsoft.com
Sat Feb 2 21:31:04 EST 2013


At Sat, 02 Feb 2013 20:56:25 -0500 Jean-David Beyer <jeandavid8 at verizon.net> wrote:

> 
> I buy stuff on-line and some of it is taxable, some is not. Of the
> taxable items, sometimes the vendor charges me the tax, and sometimes not.
> 
> What I have done is to have an expense account called something like
> "State End Use Taxable" and I put all those things in there. Where I
> already paid the tax, I put it in a better category.

Somehow this does not make sense to me.  What I would do is have a
liability account: State Tax Owed.  Then when you buy something that you
will pay tax on later (eg a taxable item that the vendor does NOT
collect tax on), you create a split transaction with 3 pieces:

payment source (eg PayPal account) 
		[purchase price] => "Computer Hardware" (for example)
					[purchase price + Amount of tax owed]
"State Tax Owed" [Amount of tax owed] => 

Assumes you bought some "Computer Hardware".  This shows:
	What you will *eventualy* pay for the hardware: purchase price +
tax.
	What you *actually* paid now: purchase price
	What you owe the state (and pay later): the use tax.

At some future time, you will pay the balance of the "State Tax Owed"
account to the state.  It *should* be possible to craft a report based
on the transactions in the "State Tax Owed" that you can use to fill out
the state's tax form.

> 
> Now I would really like to put the "State End Use Taxible" items into
> two expense categories. For example of the other category I might have
> "Computer Hardware", "Computer Software", "Movies".
> 
> I do not think I can do that directly, since if I could even put in a
> transaction like that (split), if I put 100% into both categories it
> would be unbalanced. And if Gnucash were so dumb (it is not) to allow
> that, I would be double counting some expenses.
> 
> I guess for tax purposes, I should continue as I do now, putting the
> appropriate things in the "State End Use Taxable" category. But how do I
> then run a report showing how much I spent on Computer Software, or
> Movies, etc.?
> _______________________________________________
> gnucash-user mailing list
> gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
> -----
> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
> 
>                                                                                                                         

-- 
Robert Heller             -- 978-544-6933 / heller at deepsoft.com
Deepwoods Software        -- http://www.deepsoft.com/
()  ascii ribbon campaign -- against html e-mail
/\  www.asciiribbon.org   -- against proprietary attachments


                  


More information about the gnucash-user mailing list