Employer Paid Benefits (Non-taxable vs taxable)
Gary Roach
For the taxable imputed life insurance, I think it makes sense to have an income and an expense leg on the paycheck entry since this does count as taxable income for me and the expense was paid on my behalf.
However, this doesn't include the remaining employer paid benefits for which I'm not liable for from a tax perspective. This has the problem of not representing the true compensation from the employer as well as underrepresenting the true cost of health insurance.
My first thought was to add them in a similar way as the imputed life insurance benefit.
Timothy Jesionowski
What I do is have a separate currency like CUSD (Corporate-USD) for money flows that are about me but aren't my money. Works just as well for travel expenses.
Mostly this just makes the Income balances more immediately legible.
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Red S
Many ways to peel this orange. One way is thee other reply you’ve gotten so far.
When in this situation, I find it helpful to ask myself: “what set of end results do I want out of my accounting system?” In your case, it could be:
- Numbers that match with the tax authority (in this case, consistent with IRS, 1040, and W2, perhaps?)
- consistency with your employer’s paycheck entries (for easy verification?)
- determining true cost of health insurance
- Something else?
My personal take:
(1) I’ve found to be valuable and fairly easy to accomplish. See my writeup here. I use metadata to match accounts to a W2. This allows me to record what I want (eg: true health insurance premiums) without worrying they’ll affect my W2:
I also use my rename_accounts plugin to rename accounts on the fly (eg: move Income:Employer:Health-Insurance to Equity:Employer:Health-Insurance), when needed primarily so I can use some of Fava’s features that are not available via queries.
(2) is easy to accomplish with the above
(3) is also easy to accomplish with the above. Or you could choose to simply not involve your accounting system, since that’s usually just one number per year to track separately
Hope that helps. If it’s something else you’re seeking, feel free to share.
Gary Roach
What I do is have a separate currency like CUSD (Corporate-USD) for money flows that are about me but aren't my money. Works just as well for travel expenses.
Mostly this just makes the Income balances more immediately legible.
Many ways to peel this orange. One way is thee other reply you’ve gotten so far.
When in this situation, I find it helpful to ask myself: “what set of end results do I want out of my accounting system?”
- track my employers total compensation so that I can compare employment opportunities
- verify the information on my employer provided W2
- ensure that I'm withholding enough throughout the year to avoid tax penalties
- eventually automatically import my beancount data into turbotax (or at least present it in a way that allows me to enter it quickly)
My personal take:
(1) I’ve found to be valuable and fairly easy to accomplish. See my writeup here. I use metadata to match accounts to a W2. This allows me to record what I want (eg: true health insurance premiums) without worrying they’ll affect my W2:
I'm a bit on the fence as to whether I want to organize my account hierarchy for tax purposes or not. I'm not opposed to it if there's not another way to accomplish tracking tax liabilities, but it would be cool if there was a way to do this via bean-query and tags (taxable, non-taxable, long, short) instead of having a lot of nesting within my accounts. I would really only want to check tax implications once a quarter, so a report for this would be ideal.
Red S
In terms of my paycheck import, the things that most immediately come to mind are being able to
- track my employers total compensation so that I can compare employment opportunities
- verify the information on my employer provided W2
- ensure that I'm withholding enough throughout the year to avoid tax penalties
- eventually automatically import my beancount data into turbotax (or at least present it in a way that allows me to enter it quickly)
That's an awesome writeup! I hadn't seen your capital_gains_classifier plugin yet. I'll definitely check that out. Thank you for sharing.
I'm a bit on the fence as to whether I want to organize my account hierarchy for tax purposes or not. I'm not opposed to it if there's not another way to accomplish tracking tax liabilities, but it would be cool if there was a way to do this via bean-query and tags (taxable, non-taxable, long, short) instead of having a lot of nesting within my accounts. I would really only want to check tax implications once a quarter, so a report for this would be ideal.