GnuCash doesn't handle fractional cents properly with tax tables

[David Carlson]

The "problem" with how to handle fractional cents is certainly not unique
to GnuCash.  As Michael points out, often there are local rules that may or
may not apply when calculating taxes or in any other situation where exact
values may calculate to fractions of a cent, or of any other currency.

Loan repayments come to mind as another common example where users start to
complain when GnuCash disagrees with a financial institution's report.
Generally, when the discrepancy is small enough to be attributed to
rounding, the user has to acquiesce to the financial institutions' report.
A larger discrepancy may indicate a calculation error.

While it would be possible to add code to GnuCash to follow alternative
rounding rules for all cases or for certain types of transactions, I doubt
that there could be a consensus about which rule to apply where.  This
could just make more configuration decisions for users to make at some
point in using GnuCash.  I think that the developers are correct to avoid
going down that rabbit hole.

There is always a way 'fudge' transactions in GnuCash to make the results
match an outside reference when the user thinks it is necessary, so that is
sufficient for even the most fussy user, in my opinion.

David

On Wed, Mar 8, 2017 at 3:39 PM, Mike or Penny Novack <
stepbystepfarm at dialup4less.com> wrote:

> On 3/8/2017 12:19 PM, Omari Stephens wrote:
>
>> Bump?
>>
>> --Omari
>>
>> On 03/01/2017 08:11 AM, Omari Stephens wrote:
>>
>>> Howdy, y'all.  I'm pretty sure there's a bug here, but it's not clear to
>>> me yet whether I'm also doing something wrong, or whether this just
>>> needs to be fixed.
>>>
>>> My total sales tax rate is 8.5%.  So I charge 8.5% on top of the
>>> subtotal.  My sales tax rate consists of a city rate of 0.25%, a county
>>> rate of 2.25%, and a state rate of 6.0%.
>>>
>>> I recently sent a $150 invoice to a customer through PayPal, which just
>>> charges the final rate of 8.5%.  So the total invoice amount was $150 +
>>> $12.75 == $162.75
>>>
>>> When I try to enter the invoice in GnuCash, with "Taxable?" checked and
>>> "Tax included?" _not_ checked for a $150.00 line, it shows the figured
>>> tax amount as $12.7_6_.  Presumably related to the fact that the city
>>> tax amount is $0.375 and the county tax amount is $3.375 .  I could see
>>> this as being a confusing non-bug.
>>>
>> Maybe stop right there. WHAT are the actual rules for your jurisdictions?
> There's always something new under the sun, but all jurisdictions that I
> have lived in so far did not actually charge a percentage for sales tax
> (perhaps with rounding for fractional cents). Instead they charged and
> amount AT LEAST that percentage with the state getting every fraction of a
> cent.
>
> Michael D Novack
>
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