VAT on purchase invoice

I have to set the purchase tax in 'items'? Could you give me a clue

Hi,

I think am having the same problem.

I buy a lot of external services, many on monthly repeat orders.  Setting up Items, then PO's for those items, having them 'delivered' and then creating a supplier invoice every month for every service would be a real pain.

If I enter the supplier invoice directly and use GL entries, then I also get a VAT value of 0.00.

How do I create a supplier invoice that includes VAT without going through the above chain?

Also, (currently for me less of a problem) I think the symantics with VAT are wrong.  In the UK we have several VAT rates; a supplier may supply items with different VAT rates on one invoice so the VAT has to be calculated per line item and summed.

Thanks for the reponse, Joe.

I initially thought FA was useless for my purposes, then I discovered the Quick entry method on the supplier invoice which *only* appears if you set up a quick entry correctly (IMO this should not be hidden but inactive somehow). Anyway, once again FA is a possible candidate.

I've looked at GNUCash, FrontAccounting and PhreeBooks and FA seems to be the simplest and best thought out, even if its UI is a little clunky.

(phreebooks seems to be only useful if you have exactly the same setup as the author, are in the USA and are a genius at php - I am none of these)

How difficult would it be to allow the quick entry to have the following additions:
1: Allow the line memo field to be editable?
2: Allow the VAT to be calculated per line

I think what I am asking for is a seperate popup form that allow line editing, which then populates the supplier invoice GL entries.

e.g. I want to enter paid invoices for a supplier (RS components in this case) I have an account with them so one payment covers a number of invoices and is spread across multiple projects.  My payment needs to be broken down line by line for each past supplier invoice, each project (dimension), and each tax type.
If the above two changes were made, then this would be possible.

For example, one payment to RS might look like:
Account:  Books and media
Dimension: Project X
Price: £34.99
Unit: Each
QTY: 1
Memo: Invoice 12345
VAT: none
Total: £34.99
---
Account:  Stock Components
Dimension: Project Y
Price: £0.02
Unit: Each
QTY: 100
Memo: Invoice 12346
VAT: 15%
Total: £2.30

Payment (net):36.99
Accumulated VAT:0.30
Payment total:37.29

I'm a reasonablly good programmer and fancy a crack at this, but have had little experience with PHP (I'm really an electronics engineer and use C/C++, python and assembler) and would need some pointers which bits of the code to dig into.

Looking at the database, it seems I only need to create a number of  supp_invoice_items records and a single supp_trans record, is this correct?

If I were to put my faith into FA, how likely is it that later changes to the database could mess up any past entries entered manually in the way you suggest.

Thanks,
Jason

I'm starting to understand how it should be used now.

I was thinking of payments rather than invoices, one payment against a montly account statement covers many invoices, I was expecting to be able to enter all the invoices from a statement in one go, not one at a time.

OK, I can live with that.

But, as far as I can see, the problem of tax in the line is still there, at least for me.

If I simply state that 15% of a given supplier invoice total is tax I stand a good chance of being wrong as each line item in the invoice is taxed separately so the calculation based purely on the total will be incorrect. Now to be honest I rarely order zero or reduced vat items (e.g. food and books are a classic example, but the list is huge) but I'm sure others must face the same problem?

Sounds good,

From what you have shown me I think FA does suite our purposes; that of a simple, web based mySQL double entry accounts package.   I have taken the plunge and started entering cleanly this financial year.  We are going to have to be creative with mapping our (currently excel based) accounts to the way FA does things, but from our research so far this seems to be true for any package.

Well done with what you have achieved so far and keep up the good work.  I'm no PHP programmer, but I'd be happy to do what I can to help, if only beta test.

What is the timeline for 2.2?

I looked on the sourceforge CVS and I don't see a branch for the 2.2 development, is it available?

I was very surprised that the supplier invoice form doesn't automatically calculate the VAT and set the default account.

When I get an incomming invoice for let's say a Prinshop I do enter it as a supplier with the VAT group and the Purchase Account.  Then I enter the Supplier Invoice form and it doesn't take over the defaults for the Purchase Account, neither the VAT account.  So now I have to remember the purchase account myself and add an extra line with the VAT amount. This decreases efficiency and increases human typo mistakes.

I would really appreciate if the values in the supplier record can be used as the defaults for the supplier invoice to set the VAT and the purchase account.

True for invoices with item lines. And I'm only using items for the core activities.

However I was more thinking of the non-core activities, like a printshop invoice, or bank costs, or rental bills, or lunch receipt.

Then it would be great to select the printshop, enter the printshop invoice number and total amount, then let FrontAccounting calculate the VAT and prompt with the default account for this printshop (something like 'promotion costs').

I noticed the quick entry. This still looks to fixed. I would really prefer to have a calculated VAT and a default purchase account. Simular to line item invoices, except then based on the supplier fields: VAT and Purchase Account.

Yes, quick entry is exactly for this kind of calculations. We cannot do it automatically on every GL line entered in purchase invoice just because different type of 'non-core' purchases can have various tax item rates. E.g. two different rates are used in most countries using VAT regulations.

Janusz

Well,. VAT group IS used for incoming invoices for every item included. I think you do not understand right how the tax system in FA works, but you can test it. Please observe how tax is calculated for items purchased from different suppliers for demo data. As example company use USD as home currency Junk Beer from Denmark is in Tax Exempt group, while Lucky Luck is domestic supplier. Therefore VAT is calculated for items form Lucky Luck, but not form Junk Beer.

Another thing is costs entered via GL lines on supplier invoice. Regardless of type of supplier, every individual GL line can have different nature. So even for tax exempt supplier the costs can have various tax rates related to every one GL line. If you do not want calculate it manually you should create quick journal entries for all tax schemes you wish to use.

The only constraint in purchasing is currently assumption that all suppliers us pricelists without VAT (this obviously does not mean they do not use tax, simply the tax is adde and not included). This constraint was here since the start of original system FA derives from, and unfortunately it wasn't removed so far. Originally the application was designed for b2b companies which usually use only prices stated without tax.

Finally I have to say that adding GL lines on purchase invoices was introduced to enable recording additional purchase costs. The best solution for 'non-core' purchases would be separated page with a little another ui structure, not needing selecting from predefined inventory list. FA still lack such a page, but adding manual change for tax rates in GL lines is in no way improvement. And in no case better solution than use of predefined quick journal entries.

Janusz

Well, I'm having a similar problem with purchase tax.

When I enter a supplier invoice the tax field fails to calculate and remain zero. The sales field on the sales invoice calculates alright posting the VAT element into its sales tax liability account and that is really cool.

But the purchase tax is really a pain for me since I manually calculate the VAT and use journal entry to post the tax element into its relevant account.

I would deeply appreciate any help to fix this. I'm running on version 2.2.8

This is not really the same item purchased for resale, in fact most of my purchase lines are expenses, even though others are for resale. I discovered the quick entry yesterday and realised that it does calculate the purchase tax alright.

I'm very sure "tax group"  selected is not fully tax exempt, cos "exempt selected items do not show the tax field at all, but in my case, the fields are shown but just wouldn't  calculate.

Please throw more light on creating quick entries with tax exempt items. I might be better off using the quick entries for all my supplier invoices since I don't make use of POs now.

Thanks.