Australia GST setup

[DaveC49]

Hi Chris,

Looking a bit more closely at your example I would use the two transaction
approach you labelled (2). as you are really recording two separate
transactions, your contracting to a customer for the supply by you, and your
payment to your agent of his fees/commission for his services to you
associated with that supply. One is a customer transaction and the other is
a vendor transaction and combining them in the single split, particularly if
you are using the business features (invoices, bills etc ) in Gnucash, would
confuse the program and the accounting

In the example shown, you have collected from your supplier$1000(exGST)+
$100 GST which is owed to the ATO and you have paid $330 including $30 GST
to your agent which is reimbursable by the ATO to you. The result is that
you have a nett  amount owing to the ATO of $70 at the end of the
transaction.  Unless you have a majority of other transactions where the ATO
owes you money on those transactions which exceeds what you owe the ATO
every quarter, I would use Liability Accounts to record the GSTon the
transactions, but it is a moot point and either using Liability or Asset
accounts will correctly record the information in Gnucash. 

Transactionsfor liability accounts for recording GST (replace Accounts
Receivable and Accounts Payable with Bank if the transactions with your
contractor are cash rather than credit transactions)
                                                                                     
Debit                                          Credit
Asset:AccountsReceivable                                 1100
Liability:GST:Sales                                                                                                         
100
Income:Contracting                                                                                                    
1000

Liability:AccountsPayable                                                                                          
330
Liability:GST:Purchases                                            30
Expenses:ServiceFees                                            300

After these transactions your GST account *balances *should be ( assuming no
prior transactions since your last BAS)

Liability:GST(Nett )                                                                                                        
70
  Liability:GST:Sales                                                                                                   
100
  Liability:GST:Purchases                                          30                                                                 
(contra account)
  Liability:GST:BASPayments                                                                                                        
(contra account)

When you pay your BAS the transaction is (assuming only the single
transaction in that month)

Asset:Bank                                                                                                                    
70
Liability:GST:BASPayments                                    70

and the resulting *balances* in the GST accounts become

Liability:GST(Nett)                                                                                                           
0
  Liability:GST:Sales                                                                                                   
100
  Liability:GST:Purchases                                          30                                                                
(contra account)
  Liability:GST:BASPayments                                  70                                                                
(contra account)


I am hoping the spacing survives Nabble in the post. Where I have indented
accounts, they are sub accounts of the Liability:GST(Nett) account. If you
used Asset accounts to record your GST,  you would simply replace Liability
with Asset as the account header and account type but otherwise the
transaction splits would remain the same. I hope I have not been too
pedantic, but I wanted to be clear.  You may want to read the documentation
on 
setting up accounts if my use of  "account type" (Asset, Accounts
Receivable, Liability, Accounts Payable, Income and Expense) as distinct
from the names of account is not clear. The account type is used internally
in Gnucash to support and enforce some specific accounting rules,  whereas
the name an account has no effect on how those rules are applied.

Some previous posts on using tax tables in the business features 
(http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/Goods-and-Services-Tax-GST-td4663753.html#a4663778)
(http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/How-to-configure-tax-tables-for-GST-tp3029433p3036500.html)

Best wishes 
David



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