Adding a Payroll calculator

[Conrad Canterford]

On Sat, 2005-10-29 at 22:48 -0700, Jay Scherrer wrote:
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Jay,
On my very quick look at what you had there, it makes various
assumptions about the structure and nature of the payroll deductions.
Not adaptable to different structures as they exist in different
countries. For example, most of our tax deductions work a graduated
scheme, which does not lend itself to a flat-rate percentage calculation
(and for added complication, often includes a tax-free amount). Other
deductions work as a fixed percentage of the total (like you appear to
be showing).

Your also seem to require the accounts person to know/calculate the
appropriate percentage each time (or rely on the fact that it hasn't
changed from last time) - that is all good for permanent employees with
very little variation, but does nothing for people employing casual
staff for example, where their earnings may vary from week to week.

For reporting purposes, you will almost certainly need to record how
much of each deduction you take from each employee. This could probably
be done in accounts within the gnucash account tree, and might not be
that hard, but you'd need to think about how that was structured. I
admit to having no concept whatsoever how these things are handled in
countries other than my own (I've never employed staff anywhere but
here).

I guess what I'm saying is that such simple approach does not really
solve the problem. Having said that, it might nevertheless provide a
basis for someone else to work on to provide a more generic approach.
I'm actually envisaging something along the lines of a plug-in module
(specific to each country) which calculates those percentages for you
for all the taxes and deductions. Having not seen any code, I cannot say
how practical that might be.

Conrad.