I have read various posts on this topic but none seem to address the issue if the tax amount differs by more than a few cents. I have a PI from a supplier at the moment which is out by a couple of cents. I have come across larger discrepancies in the past. Other programs (such as ARROW) allow you to alter the GST amount to match. I know that MANAGER does not allow this.
I have made up a tax code of 100% GST and add a line to adjust when I am creating a PI in MANAGER. Is this OK or will it screw up something else?
I asked the developer whether he could change the program to modify the tax amount as I have had the same issue where the tax amount is out by a penny or two.
He said that allowing people to edit the tax would mean that Manager could be used to fiddle the tax figures and it was better to develop the program so that it was not possible to do that. In one sense I agree with him, because by developing Manager in a way that you cannot fiddle the tax figures in the program he is protecting himself from any liability but also from a purist point of view one should not be able to just arbitarily adjust the tax figures.
What I do to get things to balance out is to adjust the pre tax of random items by a penny to get the thing to balance. Not ideal, but until all companies start using the same method to calculate the tax, this will continue to be a problem for accounting programs.
Manager works by calculating the tax line by line whereas some suppliers apply the tax on the total so the result differs. Fortunately most of my suppliers seem to use the line by line method so it balances.
Don’t create GST code with 100% tax rate. If you use country-specific report such as BAS worksheet, Manager won’t see this custom GST code.
To deal with discrepancy. Simply add one more line item to increase or decrease total by a few cents and allocate those few cents to some Rounding expense account.
Most companies have a Cash Over/Short expense account. Typically to deal with a register drawer being off by a few cents but you could use it for this and just add a description to explain what it is.
In the United States, we have an accounting principle that is called “Materiality”. The materiality principle states that an accounting standard can be ignored if the net impact of doing so has such a small impact on the financial statements that a reader of the financial statements would not be misled. The point of the materiality principle is that if an amount or transaction is immaterial in the grand scheme of the company, then it may not need to be treated in the same manner as material transactions.
In other words, does a few pennies here and there matter?
I suggest just writing off the difference at year end.