Two new 'tax' features

M

markd

New Member
Hi,

I've been using iCash for the past month or so and am absolutely loving it! Such a great app :D

A feature it is missing though, which is adding a fair bit of time to my workflow is the handling of tax at the transaction level.

I understand how taxes work at an account level, and have learned through earlier forum posts the best way to handle them (Create an account for tax and one for no tax, eg. 'Restaurants/Dining [TAX]' and 'Restaurants/Dining [NO TAX]' ). But to me, this could be made much simpler by adding a drop-down menu with the options from the 'Taxes' panel. For example: I live in Australia, so I have only one tax setup in the 'Taxes' panel -- 10% -- which is the Australian 'GST' tax, so I've called it 'GST'. I can apply this to 'Accounts', but if to the right of the input box 'taxes' in the transaction panel, there was a dropdown to select the 'GST' or 'Custom', I could select GST on a per-transaction level (which would be of GREAT benefit, because I am importing bank statements where some purchases have GST and some do not -- the benefit being I would only need 49 expense accounts rather than 98 expense accounts and everything would be much cleaner in my reports -- that is instead of 'Restaurants/Dining [TAX]' and 'Restaurants/Dining [NO TAX]', it would simply be 'Restaurants/Dining' in my reports, which would be a much more elegant solution).

An example of the how this new item would appear in the transactions panel would be:
Code: 
Taxes:
[ currently existing input box ]  [TAXES dropdown] [Paid|Collected|Refundable dropdown]

It seems like there have been a lot of people looking for a feature like this dating back many years, so I think it would be a very intuitive addition for both existing and new users alike.


The second feature, I would absolutely LOVE to see added, is the option to add a 'TAX' column to the 'profit and loss' report.

I understand that the 'Taxes' report exists, and it does contain the information I'm looking for (just the 'gross' and 'taxes' columns, the 'rate' is irrelevant to the 'profit and loss' report) and I also know that the 'net of taxes' button exists when generating the 'profit and loss' report (but this is not what I need, because I need to see the 'gross' and the 'taxes' and the 'total', rather than just the 'net' total).

So the problem is that at the moment, to make the reports useable for my accountant, I'm having to export the 'profit and loss report' and the 'taxes' report, then MANUALLY add a column to a spreadsheet where the 'taxes' are included in the profit and loss report. This is a very time consuming process and would be amazing if I could even just have the one column - 'taxes' added to the 'profit and loss' report, and ideally the option to have 'gross', 'taxes', and 'total' columns in the 'profit and loss' report.


Sorry for the long-winded post, but I wanted to try and comprehensively describe the requested features to make them easier understand and (hopefully) implement in a future version of iCash.

Cheers,

Mark.
 
stanbusk

stanbusk

Administrator
Staff member
If you set a tax to an account and then use that account in a transaction, the tax is selected automatically and the amount calculated. This is what users asked for and it is how it was added. Do you mean it is not suitable for you? Why?

About your second question, I take note.
 
M

markd

New Member
Thanks for your reply and thanks for taking note of the second question, I look forward to seeing how you go with the feature.

Regarding the first question, as I said in my first post -- I understand that taxes are calculated automatically at the account level when setup with taxes created in the 'edit->taxes' panel, but my problem is that it means you need double the number of accounts to allocate everything correctly when some items have the tax and some don't (otherwise, you need to manually zero them out to remove the tax if it doesn't exist). I was just asking if, in addition to being able to use the 'edit->taxes' panel to create taxes to apply to the account level, if we could use the taxes we create in the 'edit->taxes' panel at the transaction level also. Does that clarify?

Thanks,

Mark.
 
stanbusk

stanbusk

Administrator
Staff member
Yes, but why do you have to create that much accounts, what is your tax system? (Just curious)
 
M

markd

New Member
Because for a number of my expenses, there is no GST applied. I live in Australia. Here, businesses that make over $75,000/year must charge GST of 10% on sales. But if I purchase online from any other country -- USA, New Zealand, etc, there is no GST charged on the purchase. So for example, I bought iCash from you on the 24th April 2013 for $24.90 US from your newsletter deal, using my credit card. There was no GST charged because the purchase was not made from an Australian business. So for that expense which was added automatically (as with all expenses from my credit card statement) to iCash, I currently would have to choose the iCash expense account -- 'Software (no GST)'. But the next item down was an app bought from the Mac App Store online. Because the store is a registered Australian business, every app I buy from there has GST applied. So for that purchase, I would need to choose the iCash expense account -- 'Software (GST)'.

And for my business (film and TV), it applies to many of my expenses. Hardware, stationery, office equipment, education and training, etc -- and currently all of these would need two accounts -- one with GST for Australian purchases from businesses earning over $75,000/year, and one for NO GST for international purchases and Australian purchases from businesses earning less than $75,000/year.

It would be much easier for me to be able to choose a setting in the transaction panel (freshbooks has this), where I could just select 'apply tax - GST' on a per transaction basis. This way I would need only one account for hardware, stationery, office equipment, education and training, etc as opposed to two. It would clean up all of my reports and as I said earlier, to me feels like an increasingly elegant solution. Because users would have the option to apply tax at BOTH an account level (for example for my 'fuel' account, I only need one account, because my fuel is always purchased in Australia and always has GST applied), and a transaction level (for example -- sometimes if I don't retain the tax receipt for fuel purchases, I can't claim GST on it so in that case I would need to choose 'NO TAX' at the transaction level -- or as it currently is, I would manually need to zero out the tax for the selected transaction).

Hopefully this clarifies the reason for my request.

As above - I would just love an option to choose 'no tax' or 'tax - GST' from a drop down menu in the transactions panel, and have it automatically add or remove the tax based on what it selected. And obviously the 'tax - GST' would come from an entry I added in the 'Edit->Taxes' panel. For Americans it may say 'tax- VAT' or whatever. The point being, it automatically gets all options except 'no tax' from the 'edit->taxes' menu.

Cheers,

Mark.
 
M

markd

New Member
[I think the above comment is spam]

I've been working on tax stuff again today, and have one more note on this topic.

At the moment, when I import statements (I'm bringing in monthly statements exported from my accounts in QIF format), expenses initially come in with a default target account of 'DEBIT.' When I change the target account to, for example, 'postage' (which at the account level I've assigned the 10% GST tax, which I'd previously set up in the edit->taxes panel), the taxes box in the transaction panel does not update automatically to match the new account settings -- in this case, the taxes remain at 0.00 despite having been updated to the 'postage' expense account. The taxes only update correctly when I MANUALLY RE-ENTER the total which has been imported (for example, postage imported at $8.10, needs to have 8.10 manually entered in the 'amount' box again; highlighting the box with 8.10 already inside and tabbing out of it does not update the tax, the number needs to be re-entered). Then, upon tabbing or clicking out of the 'amount' box in the transactions panel, the 'taxes' box updates to the correct tax amount (in the example above, the 'taxes' box changes from 0.00 to 0.74 -- reflecting the 10% GST tax which had been assigned to the 'postage' expense at the account level).

This is one of the major causes for stress for me from the beginning. For a long time I just thought the feature was broken and didn't apply the tax for imported data (but worked only for manually entered transactions). But now I realise it's just the 'amount' box in the transaction panel which requires a manual entry to have the 'taxes' box update and reflect the taxes previously applied to each account.

ADDITIONAL FEATURE REQUEST: My newly prioritised feature request is to have the taxes column update automatically at the time of selecting the 'target' expense account, rather than having to manually re-enter the existing 'amount' for each imported transaction which needs to have tax applied.

I still think my suggestion of a drop down menu (similar to the existing [paid | collected | refundable] drop-down menu to the right of the 'taxes' box) [which you've already noted, and I greatly appreciate], to allow selecting a tax to apply to each individual transaction, would compliment the above feature beautifully.

Thanks again for all your great work, Stan! Really looking forward to the next update :D
 
M

markd

New Member
A quick note, I've just tested with changing the 'origin' account (for payments received), and these DO update the tax automatically when changing to another account (at least when changing from 'DEP' to another 'incomes' account.

I'm not exactly sure (as far as pinpointing precisely where it works and doesn't), but I'm thinking that my above new feature request is actually a bug-fix, based on the way that changing the 'origin' account is doing what I requested already, but changing the 'target' (at least when selecting 'expense' accounts) is not.

Maybe I'm just missing something. Either way, thought it was worth mentioning.

Cheers,

Mark.
 
stanbusk

stanbusk

Administrator
Staff member
Is the origin a account a bank and the target an expense? It is actually how it should be set.
 
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