* Martin Blais <[email protected]> [2014-05-17 13:52]: > I think in this case you're simply doing this wrong and you don't need > virtual postings at all. > Here's how I would do this: > > - Income counts the gross income amount ($5,200). > - Tax withholding (not just for govt accounts, BTW) is usually recorded as > a regular (non-virtual) expense, that is, you received an expense of that > corresponding amount that the government recorded in your name.
+1 As many cases in recent times, I find myself in agreement with Martin. > - Your non-taxable allowance can be tracked in a separate contra income > account (that is, one with a positive amount). That's what I do for some of > my deductions. I don't think the allowance is a deduction. If I understood correctly, the $5200 income consists of $5100 (taxable) salary and $100 (exempt) allowance. So: > 2013/05/16 * Myself > Income:Employer:Salary -5200.00 USD > Income:Employer:Deductions:FamilyAllowance 100.00 USD should be: Income:Employer:Salary -5100.00 USD Income:Employer:Allowance:Family -100.00 USD > Assets:Bank:Checking 3500.00 USD > Expenses:Taxes:Salary 1700.00 USD > > Your "net" income is simply the balance of the Income:Employer:Salary > account - Expenses:Taxes:* accounts. You can write a query to calculate it. Correct. But I think Lifepillar showed that using virtual accounts is much more elegant. You can simply use --real and get the net figure. Without using virtual accounts, you have to run a long "bal" command, especially if there are many different expenses accounts (tax might be split into income tax, social security, etc). > Here's how I actually do this (from my Ledger, removed numbers, kept the > signs): FWIW, I use something very similar. > 2014-05-07 * "GOOGLE INC PAYROLL" ^google-XXXXXXX > Assets:US:MyBank:Checking XXXX.XX USD > Income:US:Google:GroupTermLife -XXXX.XX USD > Income:US:Google:Salary -XXXX.XX USD > Income:US:Google:Deductions:Dental XXXX.XX USD > Income:US:Google:Deductions:GroupTermLife XXXX.XX USD > Income:US:Google:Deductions:InternetReimbursement -XXXX.XX USD I don't know you call this a deduction. Wouldn't Income:US:Google:Allowance:InternetReimbursement be a better name? > Income:US:Google:Deductions:Medical XXXX.XX USD > Income:US:Google:Deductions:TransitPreTax XXXX.XX USD > Income:US:Google:Deductions:Vision XXXX.XX USD Are you should these shouldn't be Expense accounts? e.g. Expenses:Health:Insurance > Assets:US:Google:Vacation X.XX VACHR > Income:US:Google:Vacation -X.XX VACHR Is this to track vacation days? > Auxiliary note: One might argue that the tax withheld sitting at the > government in an account with your name on it is an "Asset" account (one > like that for each tax year), and that the expense only gets incurred at > the time you make your tax filing for that year (e.g. the following April) I find it hard to make that argument. (You know, death and taxes... ;) > I prefer to account for taxes as an Expense, so that throughout the > year my income statement includes a good approximation of what my > tax expenses will turn out to be for that year (which is exactly > what source withholding is supposed to be), and at the time of > filing I make an adjustment on that same expenses account when I > compute the exact amount. This is exactly what I do. If you have to pay additional tax, you just book another expense If you're lucky enough to get a refund, you reduce the expense. The only downside with this is that a large refund (or payment) will mess up the overall expenses for that month (e.g. you might have negative expenses in a month because your refund was so high). If you did accrual accounting properly, you'd probably have to split it up or at least assign it to the correct year (refund in April is really for the previous year); I don't do this 100% correctly in my personal finance (so far). > I'm starting to think that I should start creating a distinct expense > account for each tax year, because that's how both the Canadian and US > governments handle it: amounts that you post get booked to a particular > year I'd use tags. -- Martin Michlmayr http://www.cyrius.com/ -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ledger" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
