Additional functionality for Employee salary

[Valdis Vītoliņš]

Thanks Derek for detailed answer!
You confirmed my suspicions about 3rd option as most useful.

To make work with salaries more convenient,
Transaction report (or ~ similar) should allow to search/filter by
transaction description (i.e. employee).

Wouldn't it easy and useful addition?
Valdis

> 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.
> 
> > gnucash-devel mailing list
> > gnucash-devel at gnucash.org
> > https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
> 
> -derek
>