I have configured payroll period, tax slabs, salary components and salary structure. When I generate the payslips for different months. It seems to give different income tax numbers.
I am attaching 5 month payroll entries.
Not able to understand the issue. Please let me know if I have misconfigured something.
Sorry not able to attach multiple pictures. But you can see from the above picture and the one in this reply, the income tax is different. Ideally, I expect it to be the same for all 12 months (unless of course there is some change in earnings).
ERPNext calculates income tax deduction based on the projected annual salary payable to the employee which is why the income tax deduction per month varies. And, in the last month of the payroll period the system calculates the income tax deductible for the whole year and then adjusts last months deduction to the balance amount.
Thanks for the quick reply @akurungadam. I understand it does income tax deduction based on projected annual salary. My question when earnings are the same, the tax should be same for all the months (except the last month may be). Why does it vary between months? This would lead to lot of confusion among employees who won’t be able to understand how the tax is calculated and why every month the payout is different.
Based on the data I have given above, every month there should be a deduction of Rs. 3750. However, I see only April month deduction is Rs. 3750. After that it steadily decreases.
Without understanding how it calculates, the HR/finance won’t be able to answer employees queries. Your help would greatly help. Thank you!
For your reference, here are the income tax deductions for 5 months (earnings remain the same throughout).
You are right that the amount of IT should be the same for all the 12 months if the gross amount is same. Would like to know if you did some changes after the month of April. Like did you put any declarations? Or any other change?
Thanks @Reema_Mehta. No I didn’t make any changes to the earnings/deductions. Its the same salary structure assignment, no declaration, no tax statements etc. I generated payroll entries for 5 months with the same details.
I understand your concern, here’s a bit more detailed explanation from my understanding of how it works.
This means, ERPNext calculates the Tax liability of the individual on the projected annual income and distributes it for monthly deduction. It is important to note that the tax liability is the tax payable by the individual on the projected annual income minus the tax already deducted in past months.
Here’s an example of income tax deductions from an individual for six months who has a gross pay of 66666.8 (as in your case) and a fixed deduction of 2000. The tax rate in the example is 5% and suppose the individual is not entitled for exemptions in income for tax purpose.
It is also important to note that projected annual taxable earnings (column D) calculates the earnings taking into consideration the actual earnings of the individual (deductions, additional salary etc.) in the previous months and the future earnings as per assigned salary structure.
I guess I was wrong about the tax deduction. I looked at it again, column F should have been divided by the number of remaining months which again points to the @mmh’s suggestion on having the deduction same for all months. I’m once again looking at the test cases for salary slip to see what I was missing. Will update here as I get to understand the implementation correctly.
Thank you for the beautiful explanation @akurungadam. I really appreciate the effort you took to explain the situation.
As you highlighted, I believe the calculation in F should be done with remaining months as previous month’s tax has already been deducted. I added 3 more columns with the way you explained and as expected IT deduction every month is the same, i.e. Rs. 3750.
Month S.No.
Gross annual
A: Gross Earning per month
B: Total Deduction for the month
C: (A-B) Taxable earnings per month
D: (C*12) Project taxable earning for the year
E: sum(G) Total of income tax deducted for previous months
F: (D*Tx - E) Annual tax liability on projected earnings
G: F/12 Income tax deduction for the month
E1: sum(H1) Total of income tax deducted for previous months
F1: (D*Tx - E1) Annual tax liability on projected earnings
ERPNext, as you suggested had calculated the same income tax amount deduction when i tried on v12. Here’s is how it looks when I created a report to show the figures we are interested in -
I think the error is due to the income tax being incorrectly treated by the program as a tax deductible item. That’s why the computed tax is always lower. I’ll post later the sample transactions showing this error. I got so tired and sleepy analyzing this.
The first table above is the Excel sheet of computation based on the tax slab (columns K-O) with the correct computation on Column O and Column P showing the incorrect computation of ERPNext.
The second table is the selected columns from the Payroll Register that shows the incorrect tax computation. The difference is the inclusion of the tax as a tax deductible item.
I think this is a showstopper for the payroll processing. Hope some ERPNext developers fix this quickly.