Keep track of income tax and GST

[DP]

Hi,

Beancount newbie here so still struggling with the basic accounting concepts.

I work as a freelance developer. For each invoice I must collect GST/VAT (15%). Every six months I must pay the collected GST, minus GST deduced from my business expenses. Similarly I must pay income tax every 6 months at a given rate (30%), calculated as the difference between my income less business expenses.

For example, a typical invoice transaction might look like this.

2020-01-28 * ""Invoice XX""
  Assets:Checking      115
  Income:ClientA:Net  100

  Income:GST  15

Ledger's Virtual Posting would allow to easily keep track of the owned tax like this:

2020-01-28 * ""Invoice XX""
  Assets:Checking      115
  Income:ClientA:Net  100

  Income:GST  15

  (Liability:Tax:GST 15)

  (Liability:Tax:Income 30)

I understand the reason why beancount doesn't support VIrtual Postings, but I can't figure out what would make be a good strategy to produce a balanced transaction and keep track of how much money I owe the taxman at a given time.

[Andrzej Kotulski]

I'm not sure how GST exactly works, but here is what I do for VAT - instead of booking it to Income account, I book it to Liabilities:VAT account. Note that both income and expense accounts exclude VAT amounts.
- I can easily see my income  (excluding VAT). To compute tax, I query for income in a given time frame and eligible expense accounts - this part is manual for me
- balance of Liability:VAT is how much VAT I have to pay in tax

2020-01-28 * ""Invoice XX 15% VAT""
  Assets:Checking      115
  Income:ClientA:Net  -100

  Liabilities:VAT -15

2020-01-28 * "Business expense 20% VAT"

  Assets:Checking -120

  Expenses:Equipment 100

  Liabilities:VAT 20

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[DP]

Thanks, Andrzej, I think that will work. GST is the same as VAT. I'll use a query on fava to calculate the income tax unless someone has a better idea.

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