[GNC] Modelling employee expenses

Adrien Monteleone adrien.monteleone at lusfiber.net
Tue May 22 21:02:51 EDT 2018



> On May 22, 2018, at 6:38 PM, Matthew Pounsett <matt at conundrum.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> 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.

I was about to note that math wasn’t necessary, but I see from your other reply, you are in a VAT jurisdiction. If the receipts don’t specify the VAT amount separately, then yes, you’ll have to do some math. Fortunately, GnuCash can help. You can enter math operators directly into quantity and value fields and it will do the heavy lifting.

For example, let’s say an item that costs 100.00 and the VAT on your purhcases is 20% inclusive (and you don’t know what the ’pre-tax’ amount is)

Enter this in your amount field: “100/1.2” (that’s the post-tax price divided by 1 + the tax rate)

This will result in the pre-tax price. (in this case 83.33)

For the VAT line item, you can enter: “100-“result from above, OR “100-(100/1.2)”. (in this case, 16.67)

So you can nest operations. The above looks easy, but when the tax inclusive amount and the tax rate aren’t pretty, it’s easier to let GnuCash do all the math.

Note, there will be some rounding issues at times. You’ll either have to decide where to adjust or consult a CPA on any rules.


> 
> 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.
> 

This was exactly the case I was considering when I suggested ‘paying’ Vendor Bills with offsets to Liabilities:Employee Expenses.

> 
> 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

No, I was suggesting to post between expense accounts (the line items) and Liabilities:Employee Expenses, but as noted, the feature may not let you.

Regardless of if you use Vouchers or Bills, the line-items should be posting to their proper expense accounts.

The first option I offered was to enter the expenses in Vendor Bills (with true Vendor as the Vendor) with line-items posting to their proper expense accounts, but instead of posting to A/P (on the posting window) instead post to Liabilities:Employee Expenses. As noted, the business features may not let you do this by default. Certainly, that account HAS to be a simple liability type. It CANNOT be of type A/P. (only the default account can be that type and be usable) You *can* however, make that Employee Expenses account a sub of A/P as long as it’s type remains simple liability. I have managed to post bills and invoices to custom accounts like this, so it might be possible to do so with the vouchers. If you can manage this, it will save you a step of ‘paying’ the Vendor Bill with the Liabilities:Employee Expense account since it is going there directly.


> 2) enter vendor bills, posted to the appropriate expense account, pay from Liabilities:Employee Expenses?

Yes, this.

Enter employee expenses as vendor bills (using the actual vendor as vendor, NOT the employee as a vendor)
Those should post to A/P as they do now, with the line-items posting to the relevant expense accounts.

You then ‘pay’ the Vendor Bill using the Liabilities:Employee Expenses account(s). This is no different than paying a Vendor Bill with a Credit Card account.
You then actually pay the employee expenses liability with an asset account.

The reason for using the Liabilities:Employee Expenses account at all is for the case where you don’t immediately reimburse the employee, or for some reason not in full on the spot and/or you want to track the reimbursement instead of it just appearing as if you paid the Vendor directly.

Also, to avoid confusion, I’d not name that account “Employee Expenses” because they are not expenses of the employee. They are yours. But in this form, they are a Liability. I’d call them something like “Employee Reimbursements”.

Regards,
Adrien

> 
> 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!




More information about the gnucash-user mailing list