GST calculation on fees is off slightly

[recped]

How "slightly"?

Where are they going wrong?

[grandmas-great-items]

5% of $1.53 is $0.0765 so how do they round up to $0.09 LOL

5% of .78 is .039 so how do they round up to $0.05 LOL

Yeah I'm laughing that it's only a penny but do that 100,000,000 times you have an extra Million so I have to LOL

Makes me think of a movie where they were going to try and get rich taking the fractions of pennies on transactions.

[recped]

Interesting.........I'm thinking this has something to do with rounding and that would apply to all the seperate fee calculations on their own which leads to these  odditites.

I looked at my last 10 transactions, they were pretty much evenly split between those that seemed to charge an extra penny GST, undercharge a penny, or neither.

I tried calculating each individual charge to 5 digits, adding those and then calculating GST, that made one calculate "correctly" but not on the second one I tried.

If you recall, back in the days of monthly invoices there were always warnings about rounding given that eBay accounting/billing has always been done to 4 decimal places with the monthly total rounded up or down to the nearest cent, I'm guessing there are still remnants of that system in Managed Payments but because each transaction is is billed on it's own there is no place to reconcile the rounding.

I seem to remember when I first was induced into MP I had this issue of reconciling the calculation of GST but in the end I just figured it didn't matter enough to worry about.

[grandmas-great-items]

I think you are correct they are charging FVF and .30 charge separately and they round UP on everything even if it's only 0.001 over and then add the 2 together for the GST charge. Now that I think about it I think I remember I noticed it before a long time ago and just forgot about it since I stopped selling.

$1.53 = $1.23 + $0.30

$1.23 x 5% = 0.0615  (Normally should be rounded down but rounded up to $0.07 in this case)

$0.30 x 5% = 0.015 (Rounded up to $0.02 as normally would)

All other businesses charge GST on the total transaction not on each individual item and they round down when they are supposed to round down.

yeah it's not a big deal...just a good laugh...like the movie I was referring to that someone just refreshed my memory is Office Space. They created a program to transfer the leftover fractions of pennies from transactions to a bank account...but it didn't go quite as they planned LOL

Have a good Sunday everyone 😀

[ricarmic]

A tiny bit of trivia interjected.....

This actually happened in real life, an enterprising person working for a bank back in the 80s I believe put in some code to do the same thing, nobody was noticing because nothing was out of balance.

I went on for quite a time. How he got caught was that the bank ran a contest for the busiest account holder, guess who came up first, a zillion less than a penny transactions certainly would come in first!

[femmefan1946]

I'm amused by the conspiracy theory that eBay Hold earn billions for the company.

Current annual interest rates are about 0.03% for business accounts.

https://www.rbcroyalbank.com/business/accounts/business-essentials-savings-account.html

That's $30 to Hold $1000 for a year.  The bookkeeping cost would be higher than that.

[ricarmic]

@femmefan1946  just a math adjustment 0.03 of a percent = $3.   (3% would be $30)

[grandmas-great-items]

Who's talking about holding money for a year?

[lotzofuniquegoodies]

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@grandmas-great-items wrote:

Who's talking about holding money for a year?

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I'm going the same way on this. Something I noticed when I was first dropped in MP. The format for displaying charges has been "modified" too many times to count. Being billed went from a physical invoice to a multiple line display with tax added and rounded "mostly up" to each line. When the format changed were credits issued where applicable?  Before it was added to the invoice....1 time. Throw in promotion fees being a entity onto itself. Should be a package deal. Wait til anyone going over on monthly alotment of listings and starts being billed for each. That will be another firestorm.

Originally when MP showed up it was announced there still would be a monthly invoice(For those accessorial charges). That was kayboshed/redacted/cancelled approx. 3 months later. Why? Just because? Streamlined for eBay's purposes?  Billing is still the middle of the month(16th/17th). Monthly subsciption is 1st to month end.  Wouldn't be easier to put everyone on the same schedule? Fix 1 month and done.

Feel free to throw in US sales tax(where still applicable) being applied at a flat rate when when some items as per State regulations are either lower or zero. Clothing for example. And isn't still the sale of currency supposed to be tax exempt? Was that ever clarified. From my understanding that can vary state to state. The regulations on antiques are just as fuzzy. (Canada)

-Lotz

[femmefan1946]

If you hold a balance of $1000 (which could be money coming and going if it averages $1000) you would make a whole $3. (Thanks for the correction, @ricarmic )

The eBay balance is likely larger, of course.

But even so, and even overlooking that eBay says it does not keep the Held funds in an interest earning account, the bookkeeping costs would be too high to be profitable.

I got the interest percentage from the Royal Bank's commercial account information page.