Since meals and other expense items are only partially deductible in many cases under tax laws, I often have need to edit Bank Account transactions (such as an amount paid for a meal with clients) by adding a 2nd transaction line and allocating the deductible portion of the total expenditure to a business expense account and the non-deductible portion to owner equity or elsewhere. If I enter the total expenditure in the Unit Price field, the Qty field accepts fractional entries (such as 0.5, etc.) and nicely calculates the Amount field. However, the Amount is not rounded to the nearest penny and often has up to 4 decimal places. Since the Amount must be in currency units, the entry must always conform to currency values. If the system would round these calculations to conform to the currency type, it would avoid the need to manually calculate such allocations on a calculator and enter them by hand. Thank you.
Two points, @Bill_Robertson:
- You don’t need a separate calculator. Manager will do the arithmetic for you. Rather than enter fractional quantities for transactions that did not really include them, calculate the deductible portion directly in the unit price field. See Perform calculations in number fields | Manager. View the result and enter another calculation for the second line item, subtracting the calculated value from the actual unit price.
- Realize that both your current process or the one described above are probably unnecessary. Tax software of which I am aware requests full amounts of partially deductible expense categories and performs the calculations itself. In other words, if you had $575.33 of total meals expenses during the tax year, you would enter that amount. If 50% is deductible, the tax software would deduct $287.67. And, in fact, most would round to $288, as tax regulations in your jurisdiction permit whole-dollar reporting. You should also find that since meals (and other expense categories) might be fully deductible under some situations, the tax software will accept full amounts of different categories. So your task is not to divide individual expenses into deductible and non-deductible portions, but to post them to fully deductible and partially deductible expense accounts. Remember, financial and tax accounting are two different things. Just because an item is not deductible for tax purposes does not mean it is not a legitimate business expense. This is why effective design of your chart of accounts must take into consideration tax reporting requirements and processes.
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Thank you for the insight! I get it! Much appreciate your quick reply.