GnuCash doesn't handle fractional cents properly with tax tables

[David Carlson]

I forgot to mention that in some calculations of loan interest in
particular there can be strange liberties legally taken that differ widely
from a simple percentage.  The 'Rule of 78s" that was once commonly used is
a gross example.

David C

On Wed, Mar 8, 2017 at 4:58 PM, David Carlson <david.carlson.417 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> gnucash-user mailing list
>> gnucash-user at gnucash.org
>> https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user
>> -----
>> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
>> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
>>
>
>