[GNC] Modelling employee expenses

[Matthew Pounsett]

On 22 May 2018 at 19:20, Adrien Monteleone <adrien.monteleone at lusfiber.net>
wrote:

> 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)
>

Ah okay.. that will help, I think


>
> #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)
>

There isn't a way to make a line item in an employee voucher taxable (no
taxable checkbox, and no field to specify a tax table).  But with a bit of
math I could reduce the unit price of a taxable item and then add a tax
line after it.  It's a bit finicky, but I think it'd work.

While testing out various options based on your email I realized I have
another reason for getting employee expenses into bills:  I've got a few
cases where a regular supplier's bills have been paid out of pocket rather
than direct from the company.  It'd be nice to have those tracked along
side the bills that are paid normally.


> 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.
>

To make sure I understand what you're suggesting.. that'd be

1) enter employee expenses as vendor bills, posted to Liabilities:Employee
Expenses instead of the relevant expense account, pay from assets as usual
2) enter vendor bills, posted to the appropriate expense account, pay from
Liabilities:Employee Expenses?

That seems like it could work.  It's similar to what I was suggesting
before, just using vendor bills instead of employee vouchers for #1.


>
> 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)
>

I don't particularly care about tracking due expenses from the rest of A/P.

Thanks for your suggestions!