Rounding error and Use Tax

David J. Bakeman dbakeman at comcast.net
Wed Oct 23 20:50:17 EDT 2013


   In my state a business is required to pay use tax on any purchase that
   didn't include sales tax of real property for use in state of the
   business.
   OK so far so good.  I found some old emails in the archive that
   suggested the following:
   Expenses:Equipment     10.95
   Cash:Check                       10.00
   Liabilities:Taxes                 0.95
   I made a small change to:
   Expenses:Equipment     10.00
   Expenses:Taxes          0.95
   Cash:Check                       10.00
   Liabilities:Taxes                 0.95
   I did this so I could see the price of the equipment separate from the
   tax.
   This works great except for I do my taxes quarterly and the state
   return just wants a total for the quarter.  In the above example
   everything is fine but over time with real prices rounding error creeps
   in.  Fine I can deal with that except I don't know where the penny
   should come from.  If the total in Liabilities:taxes is more than the
   states total would this be some kind of income?  If its less is it an
   expense?  Of course I can just adjust one of the purchases by a bit but
   that seems wrong.
   Any Ideas?


More information about the gnucash-user mailing list