Allocation of Sales Tax
For a transaction there should be an easy automated way to allocate the remaining imbalance (usually sales tax) to the other expenses proportionally. This was a feature in MS Money that I really liked.
Here is an example:
Expense:Food 20
Expense:Tools 10
Expense:Toys 5
Liability:CC Card 42
(imbalance) 7
It would be nice to be able to double-click on the (imbalance) and gnucash would distribute automatically the $7 to each item in the debt column by its proportion to the total of the credit column.
Currently I’ve been typing in the equation manually as shown below. This gets annoying after a while.
Expense:Food 20+20/427
Expense:Tools 10+10/427
Expense:Toys 5+5/42*7
Liability:CC Card 42
Harry
shared this idea
-
acharles
commented
Actually, this is very sloppy accounting, and should be left to ms money. Assigning the imbalance arbitrarily to taxes (or any other presumption) is a way to gloss over errors making it more difficult to find and resolve errors. If you bought a candy bar at checkout but did not enter it, the cost (and calories) would be hidden in an inflated tax rate. Moreover, different items are often taxed at different rates. Many states do not tax food. Internet purchases only apply state tax if it is shipped from the same state as it is purchased.
A preferred way to handle this would be to apply formulas for the applicable tax rate for each entry.