HST remittance formula

[Wm]

Tue, 22 Jul 2014 11:47:33 <E2A20969-A4BA-4A6C-A93E-3EC942BE17F4 at ncf.ca> 
Ron Stone <ronstone at ncf.ca>

>First - I am fairly new to GnuCash and, having heard about it for 
>years, wish I’d started sooner. It is a robust app and my hat is off 
>to everyone who has contributed.
>
>My question is about Canadian HST (Harmonized Sales Tax) - a 
>combination of provincial sales tax and federal GST collected and 
>administered together in some provinces.
>
>Small businesses can elect to use a ‘simple method’ for calculating 
>the HST they need to remit at the end of each period (in my case every 
>quarter). Instead of tracking every sale and every purchase to come up 
>with a number, they can remit a percentage based on total sales.
>For example, in Ontario HST is 13%. The quick method might require that 
>I remit 7.5% of total sales. For businesses such as consultants who do 
>not have a lot of purchases, it means you actually keep some of the HST 
>(which becomes taxable income).

Stop there!  I doubt gnc will handle that unless someone has done 
something specific for it.  We're into layers of tax and deferments ...

>The 7.5% above was just a number to illustrate, but there is a wrinkle. 
>For most businesses (mine at least), the percentage you remit is lower 
>on the first $30,000 and then jumps on the rest of your income for the 
>year. Say, >=30k = 7.5%, and <$30k=8.5.
>
>My question is if a formula could be written for a scheduled 
>transaction to calculate what I owe at the end of each quarter and what 
>I’ll have to track as income on my business taxes (the amount from 
>the HST collected that I remit and the amount that I keep). I have not 
>seen any examples of querying account data from a script, so I’m not 
>sure if it is doable. You would need to know how much you have sold in 
>the past quarter and how much of that is above/below the $30k threshold.

You can certainly get stuff out of gnc into a spreadsheet but ...

>I am using 2.6.3.
>
>If it is doable, and anyone cares to lend their expertise, it may help 
>document some powerful features of Gnucash.

... this is probably best in a spreadsheet for now if I am guessing the 
number of transactions, n per week or nn month rather than nnn per day.

Find the stuff you want in gnc, export them as tables once a month / 
quarter and use a spreadsheet to do the governmental sums.

Meanwhile use gnc to do the running of your business.

-- 
Wm...