[GNC] Confused Entering A Refund To Credit Card Account

Michael or Penny Novack stepbystepfarm at comcast.net
Wed Mar 31 18:00:56 EDT 2021


So many are responding to this "accounting for sales tax" question as if 
it were unreasonable to want to know what was spent on sales tax.

a) The taxes imposed are part of the expense of whatever. TRUE, and that 
is how I would do it regardless of needing to know what was sales tax.

b) BUT --- as I described, maybe you DO need an accounting of sales tax. 
I described how it might be required for tax filing purposes, so lets 
for the moment assume necessary and discuss HOW. Because of "a" above, I 
would not want to do it by "splits". It really is an integral part of 
the expense. How else might it be done ... consider difficulty. Which is 
worse, the extra work of entering everything as splits (and losing the 
true extent of the expense) or the extra work of accounting for sales 
tax separately.

     I'd say the latter would be far less work. You enter the expense 
into gnucash as normal (unsplit) and then you enter just the sales tax 
into a sales tax register. No need to use gnucash for such simple record 
keeping (a spreadsheet quite adequate) but you COULD use gnucash. Just 
as you COULD use gnucash instead of a spreadsheet for keeping track of 
mileage << the "rate" depends on for what, business, medical, charity >> 
Here I would make the decision based on whether I wanted/needed reports. 
So in the case of tracking sales tax (I never did, local income tax 
larger*) or mileage (I did) where no need for reports, I would use 
spreadsheets. But our "donations log" IS kept using gnucash because now 
I do want reports, subtotaling by category, and where the donation came 
from, cash, check, credit card, kind (since I might need that to know 
what sort of proof in an audit)

    Remember, just because you use gnucash for your ordinary, standard 
set of books does not mean you can't also use it to keep other sets of 
books. These can be non-standard in many ways, or books for virtual 
entities.

Michael D Novack





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