[GNC] Modelling employee expenses

[Adrien Monteleone]

Matt,

There are others using vouchers on this list as I’ve seen threads on the tax issue before. Try a list search and you might find something helpful. (prefix your search terms with ’site:lists.gnucash.org’ without the quotes)

On the #1:

Don’t consolidate splits when you post the voucher. (should be an option near the bottom of the post window) That will show the individual splits in the relevant account registers. (same goes for bills and invoices)

Unfortunately, there still is no means to jump to the voucher itself from a register. (or for that matter, to an invoice or bill) I think this is a general enhancement request though, already filed. But if you aren’t consolidating splits, you’ll get most of the detail you want. You should also get a voucher # in the NUM field for each transaction, but I’ve not tested it. (this does work for bills and invoices)

#2:

There are two approaches I can think of, one works well with my above recommendation for #1, the second does not.

If you’re entering line items that are being re-imbursed, why not just enter a line item for the tax? (costing it to Expenses:Sales Taxes or something similar)
This way you’ll account for it properly and be able to see it in the registers clearly.

Alternatively, I think I recall someone discussing here before that they set up a special tax rate that was tied to their Expenses:Sales Taxes account just for use with employee vouchers. (I don’t recall the purpose of a special rate for this, but it seemed to make sense at the time) Then they just entered expense items as taxable and used that rate. The voucher posted the correct tax to the proper account. (they also had a VAT complication which is what I think they were trying to sort out in the thread)

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Finally, the Voucher should be posting between the various expense accounts in the Voucher and A/P. I suppose you could try to post it to a special Liabilities:Employee Expenses account, but I don’t see the advantage and you’ll lose the ability to track them like you do with them posting to the regular A/P account. (this might not even be possible as the business features are finicky if you deviate from the included A/R and A/P accounts)

If you could cleanly enter the expenses as Vendor Bills, you could pay them with offsets to a Liabilities:Employee Expenses account. (skipping the Voucher entirely and transferring one liability to another.) Then when you reimburse the employee, you pay that with an asset. There isn’t much point in this however unless you really need to track how much those employees (and ultimately, you) spent at each Vendor. Because each one will be immediately ‘paid’ with the offsetting liability to the employee, there won’t be any related payables aging from the Vendor Bill that is trackable any more.

Or, if you really needed to track Employee Expenses due separate from A/P, and still want to use the voucher system, then ‘pay’ the Voucher with a similar offset to the Liabilities:Employee Expenses account. Then later pay down that account from an asset. (but you’ll lose the ability to track each Voucher due separately since they are ‘already paid’ within GnuCash)

If you lose due date tracking for one of the above cases, you might be able to get a semblance of it back using some creative scheduled transactions for the final reimbursement and future transactions reporting as a substitute for an aging report, but it would likely be lots of one-off work. I’d just stick to the included functionality if at all possible.

Regards,
Adrien

 
> On May 22, 2018, at 5:04 PM, Matthew Pounsett <matt at conundrum.com> wrote:
> 
> I'm just starting to use the business functions of GnuCash.. most things
> I've sorted out fairly easily, but I'm having issues figuring out the best
> way to use Employee expense vouchers.
> 
> The intended use looks pretty straightforward: enter line items attached to
> the appropriate expense account, post, pay the employee.  However, I have
> two problems with that:
> 1) the voucher line item descriptions aren't included in the split
> descriptions in the expense accounts, so it's hard to trace an item back to
> its purpose from looking at an expense ledger
> 2) there's no easy way to deal with taxes in the employee vouchers, so my
> purchases tax is unaccounted for
> 
> So.. I'd like to assign employee expenses to some other account type, and
> enter the receipts as vendor bills.  I'm trying to decide how to tie the
> two together.
> 
> My first thought was that employee expenses are obviously a liability,
> however that ends up balancing a liability against a liability
> (Liabilities:Employee Expenses vs. Liabilities:Accounts Payable).  Perhaps
> an asset makes more sense?  Balance Liabilities:Accounts Payable against
> Assets:Employee Expenses, and then pay bills out of that asset?
> 
> While I'm certain using an asset would work, I'm curious how do other
> people do this?
> 
> Cheers,
>   Matt Pounsett
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