tag:infinitekind.tenderapp.com,2009-01-14:/discussions/general-questions/185-entering-paycheck-in-moneydanceInfinite Kind: Discussion 2018-10-18T13:53:48Ztag:infinitekind.tenderapp.com,2009-01-14:Comment/1597352009-05-12T00:43:08Z2009-05-12T00:43:08ZEntering paycheck in Moneydance<div><p>You can enter in the transaction for your paycheck and have
Moneydance memorize the transaction. There's all sorts of options
with memorized transactions regarding how often it should reoccur,
if you want Moneydance to enter it for you automatically, and
whatnot.</p>
<p>The initial transaction should utilize the Split function in the
Category and be entered in the register for one of the accounts
that receives the deposit.</p>
<p>Here you can enter the gross pay as a deposit with it's own
category, enter your individual pre-tax contributions with their
own categories as payments, your deposits to other accounts as
payments (using those accounts as the categories so they show up as
deposits in those accounts), and even "payments" to your investment
account before entering in separate Buy transactions in that
investment account to reduce your cash balance and increase your
securities holdings.</p>
<p>I don't have the option to download my investment purchases, so
I enter them in manually as I'm suggesting above, but the rest of
my paycheck is automated.</p>
<p>With the memorized transactions on the home page, you can click
the one you want to enter and adjust it before recording the
transaction, but if you already have all the splits in place, then
it should just be a matter of editing the amounts.</p></div>Hans N.tag:infinitekind.tenderapp.com,2009-01-14:Comment/1597352009-05-12T02:02:53Z2009-05-12T02:02:57ZEntering paycheck in Moneydance<div><p>Thanks, this helped, but I've run into some complexity that I
can't quite reproduce.</p>
<p>In entering the split, I went to several of the accounts
involved in the split to remove transactions that were duplicated
with the addition of this transaction. In changing/updating
categories, the "split" transaction seems to have fragmented into
several parts. Now I can't find all the bits and pieces... if the
payment came from an "income" account, is there a way I can look at
the income account to see all the transactions coming out of
it.</p>
<p>I can't seem to open a register for any of the income/expense
accounts -- is this the correct behavior?</p>
<p>JA</p></div>andersojtag:infinitekind.tenderapp.com,2009-01-14:Comment/1597352009-05-12T02:11:35Z2009-05-12T02:11:35ZEntering paycheck in Moneydance<div><p>No, can't view category registers from the dropdown account
list. Instead, go to Tools -> categories and double click on one
to find all the transactions hitting that category.</p></div>Hans N.tag:infinitekind.tenderapp.com,2009-01-14:Comment/1597352009-05-12T02:15:09Z2009-05-12T02:15:09ZEntering paycheck in Moneydance<div><p>You could also try right-click on a transaction and select View
Other Side.</p></div>Hans N.tag:infinitekind.tenderapp.com,2009-01-14:Comment/1597352009-05-12T02:27:30Z2009-05-12T02:27:30ZEntering paycheck in Moneydance<div><p>OK, so I open up the "Income" category for the "corporate
payroll" income account. This category shows a single transaction
that says "increase of $x.xx", the gross pay, which makes sense.
However, it shows this as in the category of "checking", which is
confusing because that gross number never goes into checking.</p>
<p>Then, to find the paycheck details, I have to go to the checking
account, which is actually where a minority of the paycheck goes. I
do see the split there, and I think I've got the double-entry stuff
set up correctly. I guess it's not straightforward that this
"split" shows up in some random account, where most of the values
aren't related to the account.</p>
<p>Also, this doesn't capture the corporate contributions (not
counted as part of gross pay, not counted in taxable income) so I
have to create a separate split transaction for those items, but
they go to a variety of places, none of which makes sense as a
"paycheck" location.</p>
<p>Is there a way to set up an account that captures the
income/outflow associated with corporate payroll in one place, and
doesn't put all the details in my checking account and other random
categories of expenses?</p></div>andersojtag:infinitekind.tenderapp.com,2009-01-14:Comment/1597352009-05-12T14:02:09Z2009-05-12T14:07:52ZEntering paycheck in Moneydance<div><p>With double-entry accounting, there's always two sides to every
transaction. With your paycheck, look at it like two or more
transactions in one.</p>
<p>1) Your gross paycheck is deposited into your checking account,
the second/other side of that transaction is for your paycheck to
hit an income category. The fact that the same $ figure is being
booked in two places is what makes this double-entry
accounting.</p>
<p>2) Your paycheck deductions are deducted from your checking
account (reducing gross payroll to net payroll), and the other side
are the various investment accounts, payroll tax categories, and
other expense categories.</p>
<p>Any time you're looking at a register with the Category field,
the category is the other side of the transaction. So, while you're
looking in the register for the Corporate Payroll income category,
you're seeing your gross pay $ deposited into your checking
account. You're right in that the gross amount never gets deposited
into your bank account, but that's why the Split is used on this
transaction and not reported in separate transactions. Your bank
only sees the net amount being deposited so this is for tracing
purposes. However, your gross pay is still income to you, despite
the fact that taxes and whatnot reduce your paycheck. From an
accounting standpoint, that makes sense in that your salary is your
gross pay. So in order to track your paycheck expenses, you want to
show that your expense came out of your gross pay and not out of
your net pay, since the latter would be an understatement of your
true income.</p>
<p>The Split category thing makes sense, because from a cash
perspective, your bank is only going to show the net amount being
deposited into the account. The expense splits make sense, because
each of the payroll deductions are for different things and you can
decide to what level of detail you want to track those deductions.
You are your own CEO, so you only need to track what's useful to
you and Moneydance allows you that flexibility.</p>
<p>With that said, it sounds like what's useful to you is to have
one place where you can see all of the inflows and outflows of your
paycheck without really using separate Categories for everything. I
can think of three ways, off the top of my head, to accomplish
this.</p>
<p>1) You can continue to book things as you had done to their own
category, but edit the expense categories to use another expense
category as the parent (calling it Paycheck Deductions for
example). This would group all of your individually tracked
paycheck expenses under one parent Category.</p>
<p>2) You could use the Description field to label the specific
expenses and just book them all to the one expense Category.</p>
<p>3) This might work best for you. Create an Asset Account for
your payroll. Book the Gross Payroll amount to the Asset Account
and then book all of the transactions as transfers to bank
accounts, investment accounts, or expense categories. This method
would keep the Asset account at a zero balance if done correctly,
but you could break away from using the Split feature for the
Category and just have everything booked as individual
transactions, still allowing you to reconcile your bank accounts
without trouble. Then the Asset Account register would be where you
can view all of your paycheck related items.</p></div>Hans N.tag:infinitekind.tenderapp.com,2009-01-14:Comment/1597352009-05-13T12:49:35Z2009-05-13T12:49:35ZEntering paycheck in Moneydance<div><p>Excellent! I've created an asset account called "payroll
holding" to handle this. I am still using splits for some
transactions that make sense there. Basically, I have three
transactions per paycheck (direct pay, employer-paid benefits, and
employer-paid retirement contributions) which need to be treated
separately for tax or other reasons. By putting them into an asset
account that represents that fuzzball that makes up my pay
statements, I can <em>always</em> find all the pieces of a paycheck
in one place and verify that they are correct against paperwork,
and trace where they go.</p>
<p>The issue of matching up retirement contributions on the
paycheck side with transactions in the retirement account is still
a major hassle, and I don't know how Moneydance could even help. My
employer puts contributions into several "source" categories
(labelled A1, A2, A3, and B1, B2, B3 depending on matching,etc...).
On the retirement side, Fidelity maps these onto fractional
purchases of securities, but doesn't report any transactions that
correspond to the source #'s. Getting it all to match up is
currently a laborious manual process.</p></div>andersojtag:infinitekind.tenderapp.com,2009-01-14:Comment/1597352009-05-13T12:51:52Z2009-05-13T12:51:52ZEntering paycheck in Moneydance<div><p>I think there's a FAQ here somewhere... lots of folks have
complicated paychecks to cope with, and it might make sense to have
a FAQ that outlines several common approaches for handling this
(from simple to complex). If someone perceives it as difficult to
get started with entering their paycheck, that could be a barrier
to acceptance of the Moneydance product...</p>
<p>JA</p></div>andersojtag:infinitekind.tenderapp.com,2009-01-14:Comment/1597352009-05-13T17:00:11Z2009-05-13T17:00:21ZEntering paycheck in Moneydance<div><p>For what it is worth, here's how I set up my paycheck. I didn't
want the gross to go into an asset account because it would report
in my net worth.</p>
<p>I get direct deposit of my net paycheck and a number of
deductions.</p>
<p>I set up categories as follows: Salary (income) = gross pay the
rest are expenses: Fed tax, state tax, health insurance, 401k
thrift, etc. These are sub-categories</p>
<p>Net goes into my savings account as a memorized automatic
transaction. I split the amount entering the gross as income to
Salary and the rest of the items as expenses. The total left over
is my net pay and that is deposited into the account.</p>
<p>I have a 2nd automatic memorized transaction to transfer $X to
my checking account.</p>
<p>Then additional memorized transactions to buy the shares in my
securities in the 401k thrift account. These numbers change each
time so I manually fire off those transactions. The xfer to the
thrift goes in from my paycheck as cash, the 2nd transaction buys
shares from the cash.</p>
<p>So, this is what I do each paycheck: The pay shows up in my
savings & checking accounts automatically every 2 weeks. The
gross salary, taxes, thrift all populated automatically - I do
nothing.</p>
<p>Then the day after I get paid, I check the share prices for my
securities, click on the memorized securities buy transactions in
the Reminders list, enter the correct share price and fix the
dollar amount and enter.</p>
<p>So far, this is reporting the correct amounts and tallying them
up in my net worth correctly with a minimum of pain for me. For
those times when I get a different pay amount, I just edit the
salary transaction and correct the split amounts. I know I have it
right when the gray total on the bottom of the split screen matches
what my net pay is. I look at the Salary income category to see
what my gross pay is for the time period of interest.</p>
<p>I don't get matching $$ for the 401k but if I did, I would set
up a separate income category to track those contributions
separately from my salary gross and put that in as another + amount
in the salary split since it is also income to me - maybe as
another memorized transaction.</p>
<p>I could be wrong in the way I do this, but perhaps others might
have some ideas to share that are better. I think it helps if we
share our methods.</p></div>Mary