[ANN] PaysWell 0.01 Payroll Witholding Tax Calculator

[Michael D. Crawford]

Friends,

Several people asked here and elsewhere why I didn't just implement 
payroll witholding calculations in GnuCash.  I'm certainly capable of 
it, being a programmer - I needed to calculate witholding to pay myself 
for software consulting.

I'm sure that it would be great for GnuCash to support payroll 
witholding, but it's only had small business features of any sort for a 
little over a year, and considering that the Canada Revenue T4127 
Payroll Deductions Formulas for Computer Programs is an *eighty-seven* 
page document, the task of implementing witholding for even a few 
countries is a daunting one, let alone all fifty US states.

"Why not write some kind of plugin, one for each country?"

I'm sure that's a great idea, and I'd be willing to contribute, but I 
just didn't have that kind of time. I needed to pay bills and buy 
groceries, but was unwilling to pay myself without calculating 
witholding. I don't want to start my company's new life in Canada off on 
the wrong foot by being penalized by Canada Revenue for not paying my 
witholding for my very first Canadian paycheck, or not paying it on 
time. You'll see why I didn't want to just use the manual tax tables if 
you'll read PaysWell's SourceForge project proposal:

   http://www.goingware.com/payswell/

Here's another take on it: yes, I think a plugin would be a *great* 
idea, and I'm well on my way towards implementing one. My plugin is 
already calculating Canadian Federal and Nova Scotia witholding, the 
next step is interaction with GnuCash. My plugin takes the form of... A 
SPREADSHEET.

OpenOffice is scriptable with macros and can export to 
QuickBooks/Quicken QIF files. GnuCash already imports QIF. So if I can 
make my spreadsheet export to GnuCash on my own, I will have satisfied 
one of the most frequently-requested feature requests for GnuCash 
without the poor overworked GnuCash developers having to do any work at 
all. Considering how hard it's been for them to even begin to support 
all the different kind of online banking protocols, I think they'd be 
pretty happy with me for doing it this way.

Here's another reason to use spreadsheets: one doesn't have to know how 
to program computers to create and debug one. There are *far* more 
people who know how to use Excel (which OpenOffice is compatible with) 
and Quattro Pro than all the computer programmers in the whole world put 
together. Many of these people know more about their countries' taxation 
systems than most programmers do. Many people who could help, might even 
actually help, are even chartered accountants, but most of them couldn't 
be of much assistance if they had to write code.

Another reason to use a spreadsheet is that people have lots of reasons 
not to switch to GnuCash, at least not right away:

The accounting for even a small company can get very complex. It's very 
difficult to switch accounting programs in the middle of a tax year 
because one has to import the data. I'm not even going to try, even 
though I've already seen that GnuCash can do it. Instead, I'm going to 
enter all of this year's transactions by hand, so I can fix various 
problems I was never able to solve with QuickBooks.  I'm only able to do 
that because I just don't have very many transactions.

Another reason is that a user might be running Windows or Mac OS X, for 
which native ports are not available. You can use GnuCash in X11 on Mac 
OS X, and X11 with Cygwin on Windows, but I think I can confidently 
predict most potential users of my spreadsheets wouldn't have the first 
clue how to work any sort of X11 application, but they *would* feel 
comfortable using OpenOffice.

Finally, some people might choose to stay with QuickBooks or Microsoft 
Money either because they like them, or their own clients require it. I 
started using QuickBooks myself when I was required to export some kind 
of QuickBooks file to bill my client, who could then import my hours 
into his company's QuickBooks accounting system. But such people might 
not want or could not afford to continue paying $199.00 per year for 
their QuickBooks tax table subscription.

The whole reason I ever used a spreadsheet at all was that Intuit made 
me very angry by charging for tax tables in QuickBooks' undocumented 
format.  It's just not right they should make so much money by selling 
information that every government on the planet publishes for free, and 
often prints and mails to businesses at considerable taxpayer expense.

Finally, some people just prefer spreadsheets because they can see at a 
glance where their money is going, and what contribution each little 
piece makes to the total. I know that I definitely prefer a spreadsheet 
solution to the way it was done in QuickBooks before my first tax tables 
expired. Using a spreadsheet to do your taxes is a really good way to 
figure how to save money by taking advantage of tax deductions, for 
example, by fiddling with the amounts spent on different things while 
watching what happens to the total.

"But aren't you reinventing the wheel?"

I'm pretty sure I'm not, because I've been one of the many small 
businessman begging for this feature in GnuCash for over a year. To my 
knowledge, there is no Free Software solution available to calculate 
payroll witholding tax. There are lots of people who have made such 
spreadsheets it turns out, and some who are even willing to open source 
them, but I'm pretty sure I'm the first one to actually do so.

Thank you for your attention.

Mike
-- 
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com
crawford at goingware.com

   Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.