[ale] GnuCash (Was: Re: [OT] Home PBX?)

mike at trausch.us mike at trausch.us
Thu Aug 2 11:24:32 EDT 2012


On 08/02/2012 10:49 AM, Derek Atkins wrote:
> Mike,
> 
> "mike at trausch.us" <mike at trausch.us> writes:
> 
>> On 08/01/2012 12:24 PM, Derek Atkins wrote:
>>> I'm not sure where your boundary is between that and "holding accounting
>>> knowledge".
>>
>> Here is an example.
>>
>> I have a system that I use for tracking hours worked.  Every other
>> Monday, when I "run" payroll, I tally the worked hours, and I send an
>> email to the payroll processor with the employee ID, number of hours,
>> and any one-time adjustments.  They respond to me within about 24 hours,
>> with a listing of checks/direct deposit advices and stubs, and reports
>> for the current payroll.
>>
>> I then take the reports for the current payroll, and I enter split
>> transactions into GC.  As an example, I'll use my last paycheck; I
>> worked 17.4 hours (at $20/hr) for the past two weeks.  (Well, more than
>> that, but that's what I recorded.  At this time, I don't pay myself for
>> admin overhead, just billable client hours.)  So, the gross pay was
>> $348, net pay was $308.78.
> 
> Okay, in what format do you get the payroll reports?  Is it paper or
> electronic?  If electronic, why don't you convert it (by script) into
> QIF and then you can just QIF-Import the results into GnuCash?  This
> should greatly simplify your data entry.

Unfortunately, they send the reports as PDF documents.  I think that I
might be able to get CSV from them, but I haven't determined this for
sure just yet.  I still have to take some time to get familiar with
their system so that I can try to automate the interactions between
myself and the payroll provider.  I would also like to be able to figure
out if I can send them a data file that would make it possible for them
to run payroll without involving a human in the payroll process... we've
already had one pay period that had a mistake in it.  Fortunately, it
wasn't a terribly hard one to correct.

>> (Also note that the following process requires some... reworking.
>> Mostly in that I haven't structured the accounts properly for certain
>> types of things to show up on the appropriate reports in the appropriate
>> places, and I plan on fixing that in the next week or so.)
> 
> Good reporting is dependant on good data layout.  :)
> 

Indeed.  :-)

>> I then go to my "E:Wages and Compensation:Payroll:Michael B. Trausch"
>> account (I'll call this "E:WC:P:MBT" below), and in that account, I
>> enter a split:
>>
>> Account				   Debit	  Credit
>> E:WC:P:MBT			  348.00
>> L:AP:Federal Payroll				   33.59
>> L:AP:GA Withholding				    5.63
>> A:Checking					  308.78
> 
> For the record, I find that it's always easier to create a transaction
> from an Asset or Liability account.  To *my* mind, the transaction makes
> more sense there.  When you enter a transaction from an Income or
> Expense account the numbers are kinda backwards which tends to confuse
> me (and more often than not confuses most people).

It seemed to make more sense to me to start with the thing that is
actually being split.  But, different strokes for different folks,
right?  :-)

> However yes, this looks about right for your payroll assuming you are
> entering your taxes yourself.  When I did payroll myself I just used
> Ex:Gross Payroll because I let my payroll processor handle all my tax
> filings for me.

As a general rule, I do not trust vendors.  I could go ahead and do it
the way that you did, but since I'm essentially responsible for the
corporation's continued existence, I prefer to have an A/P that shows to
which entities I owe what.  That also means that if I drop the payroll
processor, I have an accurate view of what liabilities I now have to
handle myself or transfer to a new payroll provider.

>> When the payroll company takes out the taxes from my checking later, I
>> create the entry to debit A/P and credit checking.
> 
> Makes sense.  In my case it all came out in one pull.
> 

These guys are decent about only pulling things out of the account for a
single A/P category so that I can match their automatic debits against
the expenses that they belong to.  That is pretty nice.

[snip]
>>      But I can go in and do things with the
>> accounting system that the server doesn't know how to do yet (right now,
>> that's everything!) and eventually, as I teach the software on our
>> server to handle these things correctly, I transfer responsibility from
>> myself to the software.  At that point, anyone in the business with the
>> authority to do so can take the report from the payroll company and fill
>> in the appropriate spaces in the application on our company's server, et
>> voilà!  Someone who doesn't know (or care) which accounts are involved,
>> or what a debit or a credit is, can get the payroll entered.
> 
> As I said, it's certainly doable.  But I don't think GnuCash would be
> the right place for it necessarily only because it's something that
> would need to be configured for every business.  Then again it could
> just be left open (like the Tax Tables, Customers, Vendors, Billing
> Terms, etc) for you to fill in.

To a certain extent.  It would be kinda cool if GC had a way to take the
data that was in, for example, IRS Pub 15 and automatically handle it.
Someone would have to take the tables and formulas and put them in, plus
they have to be able to be updated without recompiling GC.

I plan on doing something like that when I get to the point where I'm
not relying on the payroll company.  The only real complication there is
trying to keep up-to-date with the various states.  The IRS sends out a
new copy of Pub 15 annually, so updating tax tables based on that would
work just fine.  I'm not sure if states actually all do something like
that or not.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that there are people that create data files
representing all of those things online.  I wonder how much effort it
would be to get GC to do payroll processing in such a way that it could
use those tables, and then one could be able to do things like enter the
number of hours in GC and get all the right splits out of it.  You'd
still have to print checks or initiate the ACH transactions external to
GC, though.

As an aside: why the hell don't we have a developer-friendly bank,
something along the same lines as Stripe, but that allows for small-time
ACH transfers?

	--- Mike

-- 
A man who reasons deliberately, manages it better after studying Logic
than he could before, if he is sincere about it and has common sense.
                                   --- Carveth Read, “Logic”

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