Imputed Income on (US) paycheck stub

[AC]

I am not an accountant and despite many required accounting courses in
college I can never keep the terms debit/credit straight as they flip
flop depending on the account type.  So I just call them all assignments
and I either assign a value to an account.  I'm sure many people will
complain about the terminology but I don't even use the debit/credit
labels in GnuCash, I let them be the plain English labels (withdrawal,
deposit, charge, payment, etc.)

In my case for the one time I received the imputed earnings, I just
assigned the gross pay to my income:salary account, assigned the imputed
earnings to the same account (the paycheck broke the two apart, gross
regular earnings and then imputed earnings, if they were combined I
would just have one line) then assigned all the other charges to the
various expense accounts (Medicare, Social Security, state and federal
tax withholding, healthcare, etc.)  I did the same thing for the imputed
earning by having a line item taking it back out as an expense (I called
it Expense:Misc but I could have easily given it an account all its own
called Expense:Imputed Earnings).  If you add it as an expense line item
(and give it its own account) then the final deposit value will match
the check and you'll also have a record of all the imputed values.

In your case, if the check has gross pay equal to her normal pay plus
the imputed earnings then you could just use the single line item for
gross pay and all the other line items for the deductions from the check
then it follows the model you like.  The key thing about an imputed
earning is that it's essentially a payment immediately followed by a
deduction.  You never handled the money but it passed through your check
to make the tax calculations work out.  So just treat it that way,
balancing but opposite transactions.

On 2015-03-31 10:11, Michael Wagner wrote:
> "Virtual Income" is an apt description.
> 
> I am new to gnucash, so maybe my confusion is party about debits and
> credits.
> 
> My paycheck, which doesn't have any imputed income, looks very much like
> the Split Transaction example from the Concepts guide. All of the deduction
> show up on the left in the check register (as debits), and the gross pay
> shows up on the right (as a debit) with a transfer account of
> "Income:Salary".  The sum of the debits is equal to the credit.
> 
> I like that way of looking at my paycheck pretty much, and I like one the
> "one split transaction per paycheck" model. The final "Income:Salary"
> credit is exactly what's printed on her paycheck stub.
> 
> I can make this work by adding an expense type called "Expense:Imputed
> Income" and that all makes sense. But it's feels odd to call
> "Imputed:Income" an expense.
> 
> If I enter two transactions per paycheck stub, I give up the nice "one
> paycheck stub means one paycheck split transaction" mapping, and I still
> need to debit something when I credit the "Income:Imputed Income" account.
> 
> If take the imputed income "off the books", then I think that I need to
> subtract the imputed income from the "Gross Pay" that is calculated on her
> paycheck  and enter that result into the "Income:Salary" credit. That's
> means a quick "eyeball check" of paycheck and gnu split transaction
> requires replacing that transaction. I'm numerically dyslexic - when I do
> arithmetic in my head, I'm almost always wrong. :-)
> 
> One possibility that strikes me is to create an "Income:Imputed Income"
> account, and debit the "Income:Salary" account and credit the
> "Income:Imputed Income" account.
> 
> Does that make sense?
> 
> Will the calculations be correct? (I am still trying to understand debits
> and credits, if that's no altogether obvious).
> 
> 
> Mike
> 
>> From: AC <gnucash at acarver.net>
>> To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
>> Cc:
>> Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2015 07:09:57 -0700
>> Subject: Re: Imputed Income on (US) paycheck stub
>> On 2015-03-30 21:59, Michael Wagner wrote:
>>> My wife's pay check includes a line called "Imputed Income" - I think
>>> it's a tax artifice (the money doesn't show up under deductions or get
>>> deposited anywhere, near as I can tell. I think it's way of taxing some
>>> fringe benefits.
>>>
>>> It looks like math of the paycheck stub is
>>>
>>>      Gross Pay = Deductions + Deposit to Bank + Imputed Income
>>>
>>> How do I track "Imputed Income"? Is it an expense?
>>>
>>> Is it income account?
> 
>> The best way to describe it is virtual income.  She receives a benefit
>> whose cash value is deemed to be the imputed income and then has to be
>> taxed on that income even though no money reaches your accounts.
>