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A Canadian payroll dependency chart

daemonology.net

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Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart

#111
post #109
post #100

I'm in the US but I'll say for sure that things like this are about half the reason I haven't hired any employees for my LLC. I wish I could, but I'd be de facto hiring an accountant as well!

If you are considering hiring and the hire is a developer or at all involved in research and experimentation make sure you are well versed in Section 174. You could be on the hook for a large tax bill since you have to write off developer expenses over 5 years – this is true whether an employee or contractor. Hopefully it will be repealed* – but if not it is one of those things that no one would expect to exist since…

My guy, you're replying to someone that said theyre not considering hiring

Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart

#112
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want something similar for my mortgage calculation. For example I cannot get my bank (TD Canada) to inform me of how much each payment goes towards my principal. I'm pretty sure I've calculated it properly, however the number is often in the 10's of dollars off from what the bank reports my outstanding balance is after a payment is made. Also don't get me started that I can't use an api to get my account details an…

What is your mortgage amount and what is rate? Say your mortgage is 300,000 and rate 5%. You would pay 15,000 in interest. Subtract from your total yearly payment say 25,000. You pay back 10,000 a year divide by 12 for months or payment period to get the amount.

There is a twist in Canadian law regarding mortgages. Quoting from the page linked below. --- Canada’s Interest Act states the following about amortizing mortgages: “... the principal money and the rate of interest chargeable on that money, calculated yearly or half-yearly, not in advance.” --- This page does go into the detail a little more. https://wowa.ca/how-is-mortgage-interest-calculated

It may not be authoritative but you can start with https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/i-15/page-1.html which should be.

Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart

#113
post #16

This demonstrates how any algorithm, software or not, works: Start with something desirable or necessary and add complications until you end up with a mess that can be used to yield arbitrary results, drive outsiders into madness, and summon some lesser demons if read in a chanting manner. Now what could be done about this? The obvious answer is refactoring. That's what politicians promise in election campaigns and j…

In actuality the CRA and recent federal gov'ts have done a lot to simplify taxes in Canada. It's way simpler these days. Though obviously this payroll stuff is an exception. 10-15 years ago there were piles of special exemptions carved out for all sorts of things (mostly to buy votes.) These days, if you don't have self-employment or foreign investments, etc and are just the typical paycheque-receiving wage slave, fi…

"trivial and mostly automatic" - but not so automatic that it's done for you, as in some other countries. And that's by design - Intuit still wants their cash cow providing that sweet sweet revenue every tax season.

Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want something similar for my mortgage calculation. For example I cannot get my bank (TD Canada) to inform me of how much each payment goes towards my principal. I'm pretty sure I've calculated it properly, however the number is often in the 10's of dollars off from what the bank reports my outstanding balance is after a payment is made. Also don't get me started that I can't use an api to get my account details an…

FWIW, being off by 10s of dollars sounds to me like different ideas of how to count days. Banks sometimes use calendar days, sometimes business days, and sometimes a fictitious calendar with 12 months of 30 days each.

BTW - the fictitious calendar is very often used in bond repayments - e.g. https://www.lawinsider.com/dictionary/bond-payment-dates

It has historically been used to allow for bonds to have uniform repayments across maturities (when the principal of a bond becomes due) - useful in the context of a bank wanting to hedge risks such as interest rate risk, repayment risk (if the bond is callable it can be paid back early, which means the bondholders have cash yielding ~0% instead of whatever the bond yield was)

Mortgages, though not traditional bonds (in that it's not a sophisticated company borrowing) are, depending on the jurisdiction, treated as bonds because they get packaged up and sold as bonds - the underlying bit of financial engineering that, after serious perversion, gave us the 2008 credit crisis

Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart

#116
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are considering hiring and the hire is a developer or at all involved in research and experimentation make sure you are well versed in Section 174. You could be on the hook for a large tax bill since you have to write off developer expenses over 5 years – this is true whether an employee or contractor. Hopefully it will be repealed* – but if not it is one of those things that no one would expect to exist since…

My guy, you're replying to someone that said theyre not considering hiring

That's fine, I appreciate it! We're all conversing in public, and I'm sure it will be useful to someone.

And besides, this information makes me even more happy with an opinion I already have - isn't that what the internet is for?

Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart

#117
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU has VAT (value added tax) which is added to each purchase. At the end of the year, there is nothing to report and nothing to pay. It doesn't get much simpler than this.

The original post is about income tax. While VAT is a tax, it is not an income tax.

The post I responded to asked:

     Are there any countries with good, reasonable tax systems?
VAT is a reasonable alternative to income taxes but neither the question nor my response ever specified "income".

Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart

#118
Several years ago, I worked through my US IRS tax return forms by coding the data and calculations in Scheme. The representation ended up being that each form line value was a Scheme procedure that called other such procedures, which was one way to enforce dependencies. (Fortunately, there were no cycles in the dependencies, like the article author found in their CRA payroll deductions work.)

I don't have the code handy, but the procedures typically looked like this:

    (define (form-1234-line-22--foo-income-dollars) 234.00)
    
    (define (form-1234-line-23--taxable-bar-income-dollars)
      (max (+ (form-1234-line-22--foo-income-dollars)
              (form-1234-line-21--baz-income-dollars)
              (form-1234-schedule-x-line-10--total-blort-dollars))
           0.00))
It was a lot of work, but (since I used error placeholders for many code paths my own data wouldn't exercise) not that much more work than I had to do anyway, for doing my returns with just the PDF forms and instructions. (The extra work came when I had to enter and double-check the form data manually in the official format, for this one-off exercise.)

I did this exercise to see what it would look like, would it save me time/headache, and did it suggest anything about DSLs for this kind of work (say, for domain experts to codify and maintain something more formal and checkable than the form instructions or tax code).

Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart

#119
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU has VAT (value added tax) which is added to each purchase. At the end of the year, there is nothing to report and nothing to pay. It doesn't get much simpler than this.

The EU doesn't have income tax? I think that's false.

Neither the question nor my response ever specified "income".

Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart

#120

Last time I looked at Canadian payroll services, many were very affordable. Why bother spending the time on this ?

Paying for something helps but doesn't entirely free you from a responsibility to understand this flow. Because an employee is going to ask you why they have X on their payroll and not Y like they calculated on their end and then you have to spend an afternoon reverse engineering everything the tool did because "our payroll tool just did it like that" isn't a very professional answer.
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