How to handle a sales tax rebate?

[Greg Skelhorn]

 Hello,

I am part of a volunteer non-profit recreation association. I currently use a spread sheet to track our finances. I am trying to setup Gnucash to use instead. I am not experienced with accounting software and am not trained in accounting.

I am having difficulty figuring how to handle a tax rebate. There is a 15% tax on goods and services. Our group receives an 87.5% rebate of the tax.

Background:

Actually, we are cashless in that our income is collected by our municipality as an area-rate. The money is held by and payments are made by the municipality. We assign funds to groups and projects, approve the invoices and authorize payments to be made. The municipality records activity and provides us a quarterly report.

At the beginning of the fiscal year the area-rate is transfered into our account at the municipality.
We then budget the funds available:
- assign most of the funds to groups and or projects
- direct some of the funds to a youth grant program 
- issue and approve a contract for portable toilets at sport fields (monthly expense)
- pay the electricity expense at the sport fields
- keep a small reserve amount for special events

A group may not complete their project in a single fiscal year.

We need to track the funds per group, our field operating expenses and our youth fund. Our groups are all volunteer groups and may not track their budget very well or people involved change. We need to be able to tell them how much they have left to complete their project or program. I also produce a statement for each association executive meeting showing a summary of the spending to date.

So, what I've done is create a top level asset account "MunAcc" and an income account "Area Rate" to bring in the annual transfer and place it in "MunAcc".

I have sub-accounts under "MunAcc" for "Grants" "Operating" and "Youth Fund".

Then I create an account under "Grants" for each group and transfer their amount from "MunAcc". Create a matching expense account for the group and as invoices are approved, enter transactions from the group's asset account to the expense.

Similarly I create sub-accounts under "Operating" and transfer budgeted amounts from "MunAcc". Create the matching expense account and add a transaction for each invoice.

I can see the state of each budgeted amount so this seems like it will work well for me. Now for the tax rebate. I want to track each invoiced amount and the rebate but am not sure what the easiest and best way is. 

Ideally I want:
- record actual invoice amounts to make it easier to track items and answer questions from the groups
- to see the payment amount after rebate because this is what shows on the municipality statements
- to direct the tax rebate to the groups account until the project is complete
- have software calculate the rebate amount

If you are still reading... Thanks!
Any guidance will be greatly appreciated.

Greg