On 2019-11-24 12:58, Art Chimes wrote: > In the US at least, many donations of stuff — other than money — to > charities is tax-deductible. ...> My question is, how best to record these in > Gnucash. > > I have an expense account called "charity:non-cash contributions" > where I record these (potentally tax-deductible) donations, but I > don't know how best to record the other side of the transaction. > > As a placeholder, I am using "Orphan-USD" as the source. Is there a > better way.
I should say so! "Orphan" isn't meant to be a permanent repository of any transactions, as far as I'm aware. > Note: I do not want to be tracking the purchase cost of every item I > donate, and don't want to muck about in the pond of depreciation > either. Good news! Your purchase price is irrelevant, and depreciation is irrelevant, so you have no need to keep track of either. The US IRS says: "you generally can deduct the fair market value of any other property you donate to qualified organizations" Source: https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc506 Note: fair market value. Not cost, not cost net of depreciation. Fair market value. (There's one caveat, on the same web page: "Special rules apply to donations of certain types of property such as automobiles, inventory and investments that have appreciated in value. For more information, refer to Publication 526, Charitable Contributions." But your examples don't sound like these types of things.) The problem, of course, is how to determine fair market value without selling the goods. The recipients will almost certainly not give you a valuation, just a receipt for items, so finding FMV is your problem not theirs. If you're donating books to a library book sale, one way to determine FMV would be to ask what they sell books for -- most likely either per volume, per pound, or per bag. Whichever it is, it will be a tiny fraction of what you paid for the books or what bookstores are charging now. Assuming your canned goods are not near their expiration, not dented or rusty or otherwise unsalable, their FMV is what grocery stores are currently charging. Similarly for hard goods like plumbing supplies, though you should probably make a reduction if they're not in their original packaging, especially if they have been used at all. The usual caveats: I am not a tax professional, and you should check this out yourself rather than relying on what I tell you. As for how to account for these donations, I think Kevin Reid's answer is a good one, and it's what I do: > you could record them as negative expenses — if you donate, say, > food, record them against your expense account for food. This ... > seems reasonable to me because the sum of your expense account will > then more closely track the amount of food you purchased for your own > use, excluding the donated food. -- Regards, Stan Brown Tompkins County, New York, USA https://BrownMath.com http://OakRoadSystems.com _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list [email protected] To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information. ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
