I don’t know so much about GST but in Italy, the land of burocracy, we have a solution in localized softwares achieved by adding an “extra layer” over taxes that overrides some or all the setting only if selected.
Think of this layer as a group of taxes. Each group can contain different or shared (with other groups) taxes.
If you select a tax group besides the tax code the settings that were set in it will override some/all the settings of the tax. If you don’t, everything will work as before.
If you then add a extra settings inside tax code (and consequently inside tax group) to decide, only if you need it, if it is only a tax receivable or payable the job is done.
In this way:
- if you don’t change anything everything will work as before.
- if you want to create only tax codes, and don’t want to use tax groups, you can decide inside of them if the tax is receivable or payable or leave one indistinct (in this case Manager will work as before).
- if you don’t want to have many tax duplicates you can create a group or many groups that will override some or all the settings. For example you can have a 20% VAT and then two groups assigned to this tax that will set if it’s receivable or payable and even differentiate the account in which they will be registered.
It is something very similar to how user groups and users works under Windows and Linux.
Let me know if it is of your interest and you want to deepen this argument… I can do some mockup to explain it better.