HST remittance formula

[Ron Stone]

On Jul 22, 2014, at 7:16 PM, Wm <wm+gnc at tarrcity.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> 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 …

Actually, there is only one layer of tax for accounting purposes. No ‘tax on tax’ situation’. As Derek Atkins pointed out in another post, it would be quite doable if something like balance-as-of-date() were accessible from scheme. 

> 
>> 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.

I’ve been doing this manually for years and there is no reason I can’t continue. I was wondering out loud if I could automate it in Gnucash, which would have been great to have. 

That said, making balance-as-of-date() available from fin.scm might open all sorts of useful possibilities for users in general.

> 
> 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...
> 
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