Hi, ledger friends- Happy Mother's Day!
I realize this is an Accounting 101 question and not ledger-specific, but for the people on this list using ledger to manage their own business: how do you categorize dividends vs wages? Are they technically considered expenses or liabilities? I track W2 wages as Expenses:Acme:Pay:Alice and dividends as Expenses:Acme:Pay:Dividend:Bob. It seems to be working fine for my wife's business since I started using ledger back in February, but I wonder if there's a better way? Should payroll for each employee be modeled as something like a debit to Liability:Acme:Salary:Alice and a credit to Expense:Acme:Accounts Payable:Alice:Salary? Should dividends be a debit to Equity:Acme:Owners:Bob? Also, how do you track payroll taxes? In the US employers are required to automatically withhold a percentage of an employee's wages and pay taxes with that money on the employee's behalf, and additionally there are other taxes that are the emplyer's responsibility. I'm just tracking them as separate expense accounts, but I feel like professional accountants probably have a better method. (Apologies to int'l readers if this is too US-specific) For what it's worth, I've mostly been re-reading this section of the manual for inspiration: https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Tracking-reimbursable-expenses. If there are other good sources of information for these types of things I'd appreciate pointers (I've bookmarked the Software Freedom Conservancy tutorials from plaintextaccounting.org but haven't gotten around to reading them yet; are they applicable to for-profit business entities as well?). I'm curious to hear how other people handle these issues in their ledgers. Thanks in advance! Best, Kent -- --- 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]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ledger-cli/1589148317.745418850%40apps.rackspace.com.
