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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