Thanks Dan, that makes a lot of sense and lines up with Ben's suggestion as 
well. I think in my case I'll keep the income leg separate as well in an 
"Income:Hooli:BIK" instead of adjusting the ":Salary" leg. This way I 
retain the distinction between the "real" salary and the benefits, but 
apart from that it should be the same.

I think I now have a way forward to continue my journey with beancount!

Many thanks,

Pedro

On Friday, 26 February 2021 at 19:01:08 UTC [email protected] wrote:

> Hello Pedro,
>
> except the name, which I never heard before, I think this form of
> benefits is rather common. The way I handle it is to simply record it as
> an expense, ie the fact that the money never reaches my bank account is
> not relevant for accounting purposes. The expense is recorded as a
> posting in the same transaction that record the payslip, so that the
> "atomicity" of the operation is not lost.
>
> In your case, it seems that this requires juggling the amounts a bit:
>
> 2000-01-31 * "Salary"
> Income:Hooli:Salary -2050.00 GBP
> Assets:Pension 500.00 GBP
> Expenses:Taxes:Income 250.00 GBP
> Expenses:Taxes:NI 50.00 GBP
> Expenses:BIK 50.00 GBP
> Assets:BankAccount 1200.00 GBP
>
> IIUC what the end result is supposed to be.
>
> Cheers,
> Dan
>
>
> On 26/02/2021 19:02, Pedro F wrote:
> > Hi everyone, I've been lurking here for a while as I migrated my 10
> > years worth of transactions into beancount (from a bespoke solution
> > involving excel and python). I'm now fine tuning things and starting to
> > extract nice report and I'm really pleased with beancount/fava and what
> > it can do, including how easy it is to intergrate with Jupyter. Thanks
> > for all the effort put into this great tool :)
> > 
> > I'm struggling to represent how benefits in kind (BIK) are handled in my
> > payslip. This is likely to be very UK specific but I was hoping someone
> > could share some ideas. An example of a BIK is health insurance where
> > the employer pays for the benefit but the employee still has to pay tax
> > on it (basically increasing the taxable income).
> > 
> > Here's a made up example of how this shows up in a payslip:
> > ---------------------------
> > Gross Pay:
> > - Salary: £2000
> > - Pension Contribution: -£500
> > - BIK: Health Insurance: £50
> > Total Pay: £1500
> > 
> > Deductions:
> > - Income Tax: -£250
> > - National Insurance: -£50
> > Total Deductions: -£300
> > 
> > Net Pay: £1200
> > ---------------------------
> > 
> > Noteworthy points:
> > 
> > - Total Pay = Salary + Pension Contribution (or, more generically,
> > SUM(Gross Pay items) excluding BIK entries). Pension contributions are
> > taken from the gross salary, decreasing the taxable income.
> > - Total Deductions = SUM(Deductions)
> > - Net Pay = Total Pay + Total Deductions
> > 
> > The taxable income, that is not reported in the payslip but it's what is
> > reported to the tax man and what's used to decide how much tax we pay,
> > does include the BIK entries. If I check the details on HMRC (IRS in the
> > US I guess), the taxable income for this month would be £1550.
> > 
> > When it comes to beancount, I could just ignore the BIK entries and log
> > it as:
> > 
> > 2000-01-31 * "Salary"
> >     Income:Hooli:Salary       -2000 GBP
> >     Assets:Pension            500 GBP
> >     Expenses:Taxes:Income     250 GBP
> >     Expenses:Taxes:NI         50 GBP
> >     Assets:BankAccount       1200 GBP
> > 
> > But this doesn't make it possible to calculate the taxable income and If
> > I add postings with the BIK entries the transaction doesn't balance.
> > 
> > My goal is to be able to extract a report of my actual taxable income,
> > which means that I need to somehow add the BIK postings to the 
> transaction.
> > 
> > Does anyone have a sensible way to represent this? I feel like I may be
> > missing something very obvious :)
> > 
> > Thanks
> > 
> > Pedro
> > 
> > 
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> > <
> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/5cf5bddb-3945-48df-85a6-566df31f652bn%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer
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>
>

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