linux accounting software or cheap winxp

[Dan Jenkins]

Derek Atkins wrote:
> Lloyd Kvam <python at venix.com> writes:
>   
>> NOTE-- The payroll documentation says:
>>
>> GnuCash does not have an integrated payroll system.  While you can track
>> payroll expenses in GnuCash, the calculation of taxes and deductions has
>> to be done outside of GnuCash.
>>
>> That's the last piece a small business would seem to need.
>>     
> Doing payroll is harder than it seems.  There are pretax and posttax
> deductions, and then there are all the various taxes that need to be
> taken out, some from the employee, and some employer-paid.  Then of
> course there's the fact that each locale has its own tax rate, and those
> change year to year...  I think the best we could do in GnuCash is come
> up with a good payroll framework and then let the actual tax rates and
> local rules get plugged into the framework.
>
> This has been discussed on the gnucash-devel mailing list, and I
> encourage anyone interested in this topic (or better yet, interested in
> implementing it!) to join that list and bring it up there.
>   
I wrote a payroll system a few decades ago. As I started from a far too 
simplistic framework, I created something too baroque to be maintainable 
in the long run. Coming from New Hampshire's fairly simply P/R taxes, I 
had no idea how complicated taxation could be elsewhere. Being a green 
software engineer didn't help, of course. I used to be amazed that 
no-one had developed a common framework that everyone could simply 
incorporate in their products. I still think it could be done. Now I 
would envision it as a separate service independent of GnuCash (or 
whatever application), so those applications would not need to embed the 
varying rates & logic within themselves, just pass some information to 
the payroll service, which would internally track the pay information, 
and the application would get back the results. Not that I have any 
desire to tackle that project ever again.