Transaction Details Report

[David T.]

John,

I don’t see any other replies..

I don’t have much to comment on your approach to handling the tax preparation season. I *can* tell you that I have, over the years, made use of GnuCash’s tax reporting options to greatly facilitate my tax preparation. 

I will preface this by saying  that I am in the US jurisdiction, for which there are GnuCash tools (Thanks, Alex!) that mesh with the US tax code.

What I do is use different accounts in Gnucash for the different tax reporting areas, e.g. Expenses:Tax:Federal or Expenses:Charity. I use the Tax Report Options to attach each account to an IRS tax line (Edit->Tax Report Options), and then I can use the TXF report to pull numbers for reporting needs. I have found this to be very easy and quite reliable. I usually spend a couple of days comparing my GnuCash numbers to the various tax forms I receive (W-2, 1099, etc.) before I commit these numbers to the tax forms, but I am confident that my books match with the rest then, and I can breathe easy.

I have found in my books that certain practices I follow have resulted in a proliferation of accounts (for example, I adopted a policy of setting up separate accounts for each stock’s dividends, which I now believe to be overkill). I have also found that this approach requires a high degree of matching between my transactions and the reporting agencies—for example, it is not enough to enter a paycheck with just the amount that goes into your checking account, you have to put every line from your paycheck into GnuCash with correct accounts. Although it slows the data entry down, it sure does speed up the tax prep!

I hope that helps,
David

On Jan 3, 2015, at 7:39 PM, John Morris <johnjeff at editide.us> wrote:

> Hi All,
>  I just moved to GnuCash last summer, so I have not been through a whole year with it yet. Right now, I'm struggling with how to get a simple transaction report. I use this report in a spreadsheet to calculate our annual taxes. For this report, I just need every single transaction from the year, each on a single line. I imagine that there is an easier way to calculate my taxes in GnuCash, but I won't have time to use that method this year. Hopefully, I will be able to learn more about GnuCash's reporting features in the future.
> 
>  So, I found the "Transaction Report" in the Report menu and it seems to do exactly what I want with one problem. Split transactions are reported on a single line with no indication of the other account: The words "split transaction" take the place of the other account name. My immediate problem is that we have a number of transactions in one account where we track payments we received from clients through PayPal. Each transaction has the amount of the payment applied to our Editing account and the amount of PayPal's fee applied to the Service Charge account.
> 
>  When I pull the Transaction Report, I invariably get just one of those splits from each transaction in our PayPal account, either the Editing line or the Service Charge line or the net amount applied to the PayPal account. Of course, I could export a couple of reports and then massage the data after the fact some and come out with what I'm seeking, but it would be nice if I could just pull one report to get what I need. It seems to me that this is a simple enough report that it should come as default. Does it?
> 
> Thanks,
> John
> 
> 
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