Additional functionality for Employee salary

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

Valdis Vītoliņš <valdis.vitolins at odo.lv> writes:

> Investigating employee expense vouchers for salaries seems not
> sufficient.

That's because employee expense vouchers are NOT for salaries, they are
for employee expense reimbursements.  They are not and never were
designed for salaries.

Payroll computation is a HARD THING to get right.  It's not just as
simple as adding a payroll tax table.  You have to deal with different
kinds of withholdings, limits, pre-tax and post-tax, tax-on-tax, etc.
And it varies from locale to locale.

TRUST me, you do NOT want to try to squeeze that into the employee
expense vouchers.

> To use them for Latvian legislation each entry should be with tax
> similarly to Invoice,
> and vouchers should be easily duplicated or scheduled.

Maybe in Latvia.  That definitely wouldn't fly in the USA.

> As vouchers are similar to invoices it seems to be easily
> implemented/fixed.
> Duplication/scheduling could be harder work.

Actually, duplication/scheduling is MUCH MUCH easier than fixing the tax
withholding problem!

> Workaround for current implementation would be:
> 1. separate entries for taxes (not optimal as requires more manual
> calculations and typing work),
> 2. treating employees as  "Customers" (can use tax table, but still
> can't duplicate/schedule),
> 3. not use invoices/vouchers at all and use split transactions (can be
> easily duplicated and scheduled, but is hard to print as Salary list).
>
> Any thoughts?
> Valdis

You've only touched the tip of the iceburg in adding Salary to GnuCash.
You need a complete framework in order to plug in all the various taxes,
limits, and withholdings for various locales.

Also, you need to keep in mind that some places have payroll taxes on
top of the salaries.  For example, in the USA there is a 6.9% Social
Security Tax that is withheld from the pay (up to an annual total of
something like 100,000/year -- once you reach the salary cap this tax no
longer applies).  But on top of that the employer owes another 6.9%
which does NOT come out of the salary, but instead is owed by the
employer!

Then of course there are pre-tax deductions for things like healthcare
insurance.  So you have to substract those premiums before you compute
the taxes.  But of course there are also post-tax deductions, where you
compute the tax and THEN make the deduction (for example, life insurance
premiums).  However this is not necessarily true for ALL taxes; some
withholdings can apply differently as pre-tax or post-tax to different
taxes.

Honestly, I can't even imagine how you'd fit these rules into the
expense vouchers!

Personally I think you should do something like #3, but you can still
create a Salary List as part of the ancillary information in the invoice
itself.  Of course, printing out per-user annual to-date totals might be
challenging, but again you could do it with ancillary data similar to
how customers and vendors can share a single A/R or A/P account.

But I think overloading the employee expense vouchers is definitely NOT
the right thing.

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-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
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