Hi John,

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>The paychecks are hand written (small amount of employees) I have the tax tables. What are the considerations for tracking taxable amounts? This is a small buisness that does this all by hand now. < 20 employees. She needs a report to fill out paychecks from that shows all deductions and taxes. I am thinking along the lines of an edit for the weekly payroll where she can check everything and add manual deductions (employee loan etc.) then post the edit to a table and print the reports ...
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Where to begin ???? First of all, don't forget about employer taxes. It has been some time since I had payroll responsibilities but employers must pay taxes for FICA, FUI AND SUI and each of those taxes has a wage limitation. So you must keep track of earnings by those categories so you know when to stop paying the tax. Taxes withheld from employess must be paid to the government according to a schedule which depends on the total amount withheld.

On top of that, if you are making deductions for other liability accounts such as 401K or union dues etc etc, you must track those and pay them over to the appropriate place.

And, don't forget about W-2 forms on which you have to report several categories of earnings and deductions.

Suffice it to say that trackink hours and generating gross payroll is not even half of the job.

But any good bookkeeper would know all this stuff. And I'm sure there are some small business accounting packages like Quick Books that can keep you straight.

I understand the desire to feed data from your project management app into payroll but, in my experience that is a good idea in theory only. Usually, folks are paid either a salary oy hourly, and I sincerely doubt that you are tracking all of the hours for which a person is to be paid in a project tracker. What about training and meetings and admin work that is generally considered overhead and not accounted for by project?

Hope this helps,

Ken