Long time Manager.io user here, but not an accountant, just a small charity.
The new Projects feature is great, and we can see the massive time benefits to a small organisation such as ours in being able to track the overall health of grants/projects.
The only issue we are having is that we cannot attribute Payslip Items to a project.
As a typical example:
Employee 1 has a salary
We receive a 50% monthly contribution to that salary from Grant 1
The remaining 50% is made up of our own money
We need to attribute 50% of earnings to Grant 1
We can do this for receipts and payments now using the Projects option
Unfortunately there is no option to choose a project on the Payslip line items - we hope this can be done because it would perfect for us then.
Video of what I mean in case that isnât clear (apologies for poor Audio)
Thanks very much for your time and for the continued development of this software
Grants are other income and you didnât have the employee working 50% of his time just to get the grant.
Costing should correspond closely to how you allocated your resources, meaning Employee 1 can have his cost allocated to, for example:
Serving customer A
Processing product B
Building asset C.
Even in those cases, you donât use the Payslip to allocate the costs, it is inefficient and overly complicated. You should either use a journal or wait for the developer to release the Timesheets tab.
In any case, itâs improper accounting to allocate costs to a grant.
What you suggest would require separate payslip earnings items. And you will get wrapped up in local legal requirements on how to account for grant incomeânot a straightforward topic, and beyond the scope of this forum. Proper accounting aside, it seems this might be handled better by simply assigning the different earnings items to different expense accounts.
Thereâs no portal right now but you already have unlimited users so you can give them restricted view and create access to the Timesheets tab only.
Also, no approval process is required if the users have no access to update or copy to Payslips. Because effectively, copying the time to a Payslip should serve as your approval.
Thanks everyone for your advice and contributions, apologies for the delay in my reply Iâve been away.
Iâm clearly not an accountant so forgive my ignorance on this but we get grant funding contributions towards salaries quite frequently and usually alongside other funds.
Given that we get multiple grants to tackle this and the funds are usually held in an alternative account to our main bank account - how best do you think to handle this in manager so that we can see how much of the remaining Grant funds for that particular grant, is ringfenced for wages?
As an example case:
Grant 1 = 10,000 (ÂŁ5000 wages contribution)
Grant 2 = 5,000 (ÂŁ1500 wages contribution)
We need to track how much of the ÂŁ5000 for wages is remaining, inside of the Grant 1 as we spend it.
Same for Grant 2, 3 ⌠etc.
We were using expense accounts for this with tags, but itâs more cumbersome.
We were also paying wages with contributions in blocks; so in two payments (1 portion from grant account and 1 from our main account) - which again is cumbersome, but at least accurate.
I know in hindsight it wouldâve been better to move the wages portion of the grant funding into our main account to avoid this, but at the time we were swamped and we came up with a poor system (only 2 of us).
We will probably do this going forward, but for legacy I was just wondering if there was a way to clean this up.
@DIC Having read this once more, I now see that youâve received the grant in advance and you want to keep to track of the remainder.
In that case the grant should be a liability against those funds youâve received which should be amortized as you pay your employees over the term of the grant.
So your initial record of it should have been using Receipts against âUnearned Grantsâ liability accounts â one for each type of grant.
As for the amortization â as an accountant, I would handle this using Journals, but I can see the efficiencies in automating this using Payslips.
If we stretch the definition of contributions â which are accumulation of benefit obligations on the part of the employer â we can say that the amortization of the grant is a negative contribution. But that all depends on whether the law allows such creative use of contributions on official Payslips so you will have to consult your local labor laws.
Otherwise just amortize your liability using a Journal Entry like this:
Account
Debit
Credit
Unearned Grant - A
X
Other income or Payroll expense
X
And youâre a right, depositing the grants in separate bank accounts wouldâve helped immensely but even then youâd still have to use a liability accounts because P&L accounts will offer little to no help in this regard.
I want to side with @DIC and @subrosumon. For expense claims and invoicing, you can pick Projects, I believe that we should also be able to pick Projects for Payslips (for Earnings and Employer contributions) in order to track the cost of Labour on specific projects as part of the Direct Cost of projects.
My opinion is that we donât really need a separate Timesheets tab for this except if this Timesheet module is going to introduce new functionality or replace the Payslip module.
For users who want to use Projects to track total project expenses, hired labour expenses and staff costs on projects whether in the non-profit industry or for-profit businesses must be recorded as part of the projectâs direct cost (Direct labour) and reported as such in the income statement and in the Projects tab (see inserted screenshot).
You can use the Billable time to record the cost of labour. But you cannot use Billable time to charge costs directly into the project and report as âDirect Labourâ.
That is what must be done. Auditors and tax people prefer that because it makes their project (grant) auditing easy. See the example below for some NGOs.
Yes, no project must be selected for the receipt of Grant Funds. You have to select a Project when generating a Sales invoice for work done (Earned Grant).
