Canada Business End-of-Year Tax Statement (T4) generation.

[R. Victor Klassen]

The way I look at it is if it is starting to take way to long to do payroll every pay period, then it makes sense to try to automate things better.
With two employees, I would have to guess that you are better off staying with a spreadsheet.  This makes it easier to generate the data you need every quarter for remitting, as well as the T4s next January/February.  

If you do the thorough splits you’ve suggested below, two comments: first, it doesn’t scale well.  If your business grows, you wouldn’t want to be doing something like that for every employee.  But maybe that’s not a consideration.  But the second one is, like you say, it could be error prone if you don’t automate it (which is what I’m attempting to do, but that’s still in beta, and has a number of agricultural-worker-specific features).  And the problem with errors is that you might wind up getting the tax forms wrong, but more likely you’ll spend hours finding and fixing any errors that do come up, and that’s where you wish you stuck with what was already working.

On Apr 8, 2014, at 3:54 PM, Damon Erickson <damon at metapaso.com> wrote:

> I'm still trying to decide whether to keep track of the totals in excel and then duplicate the transactions into GnuCash (arrgh duplicate labour) or whether to use subaccounts for an all-GnuCash process.
> 
> My problem is that I've only done the year-end totals once (end of 2013 using excel), and I'm not comfortable with the implications of using GnuCash if I can't sort/filter the data that I need. The extra layer here is in the methodology we use to claim childcare expenses, which requires individualized totals for every employee.
> 
> Seems like for maximal coverage of all the things I currently track in excel, I would need:
> 
> Expenses:Payroll:Employee1
> Expenses:Payroll:Employee2
> Expenses:CPP:Employee1
> Expenses:CPP:Employee2
> Expenses:EI:Employee1
> Expenses:EI:Employee2
> 
> Liabilities:CRA:FedWitholding:Employee1
> Liabiltiies:CRA:FedWitholding:Employee2
> Liabilities:CRA:ProvWitholding:Employee1
> Liabilities:CRA:ProvWitholding:Employee2
> Liabilities:CRA:CPP:Witholding:Employee1
> Liabilities:CRA:CPP:Witholding:Employee2
> Liabilities:CRA:CPP:Employer:Employee1
> Liabilities:CRA:CPP:Employer:Employee2
> Liabilities:CRA:EI:Witholding:Employee1
> Liabilities:CRA:EI:Witholding:Employee2
> Liabilities:CRA:EI:Employer:Employee1
> Liabilities:CRA:EI:Employer:Employee2
> 
> These are the values I track in excel.  We have turnover of maybe one employee per year, maybe fewer.  Is this even sane?  It seems so prone to error, like if I accidentally put the wrong split, this could get really out of hand.
> 
> What do you think I should do? Is there a good tutorial on filtering in GnuCash?  I don't see any intuitive interface anywhere.
> 
> Damon
> 
> 
> On 14-04-03 01:15 PM, Cam Ellison wrote:
>> On 03/04/14 05:00 AM, R. Victor Klassen wrote:
>>> I have not been able to figure out how to get GNUCash to tell me everything I need to know at the end of the year for the purpose of T4 slips.
>>> We have more like 8 employees, and last year I used a spreadsheet to track everything from hours worked to EI withheld.
>> Really - that's the best approach for that many.  Anything else is much too complicated and prone to error.  Doing it all within GnuCash worked for me only because there were only two regular employees, and not having to deal with EI did simplify it somewhat.
>> 
>>> I’m guessing you use the online deductions calculator.   To do so you need to record somewhere - even if only by printing the summary sheet it provides per employee - the year to date amounts.   At the end of the year you can copy them into the online T4 form.
>> I used that myself, and downloaded the result.  If you use Okular for pdf files, with a little fiddling around you can copy and paste from the downloaded deductions form and reduce the likelihood of error.
>>> 
>>> It turns out there is no need to keep a separate liabilities account for EI and CPP (but there should be one for WSIB).   The government gives us no way of distinguishing them until T4 time.
>>> 
>> I assume, though, that the employer must still remit 1.4 times the EI deduction, which suggests at least an additional item in the split.
>> 
>> Cheers
>> 
>> Cam
>> 
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