Re: Payroll, the state it's in (if any), and where to start

On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 8:00 AM, Gerald A <..hidden..> wrote:

Hi Chris,

On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 12:27 AM, Chris Travers <..hidden..> wrote:

On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 12:22 PM, Gerald A <..hidden..> wrote:

I'm looking to start with some baby steps and some community advice.

The place that reached out to me is conducting business in Ontario Canada, so if anyone has used payroll in that neck of the woods, it would be helpful.

Mostly, though, I'm wondering what version I should be targeting. 1.3 is the stable prod version, but in digging through docs and articles and google searches, it seems there is a 1.4 "beta" that might have some of the hooks in there. But the code at sourceforge looks a bit older (early 2013) for the beta.

1.4, and target svn trunk/. We haven't released a beta in some time and we should. But I say target 1.4 for two reasons.

First, we can help backport this to 1.3 if you need it, and if you have something running on 1.4, chances are it will work for the foreseeable future. There are some additional dependencies, particularly involving Moose, but a backport would be pretty straight-forward.

Hrm, haven't used Moose, and I'm not a Perl guru, but I've played with the code in the past. At this point I'm version agnostic -- my only concern was lack of activity on 1.4, but a new feature can sometimes help nudge a newer release forward. :)

Don't confuse lack of beta releases with a lack of development activity. The reason for the beta is that we have some loose ends that are a bit problematic to release a beta with and are working on them. There's a lot of work that's gone into 1.4 this year and we've had to expand the release target a little.

If I do target 1.4, my only request would be that it's ready to be used -- I'd like to write things and push them out to my target user, and don't want to have them debugging problems not related to my stuff. They don't have too much complexity outside of the payroll stuff, so fancy new features not being ready for prime time isn't a concern.

Right. If you are going to push it out to a user right now... 1.4 is used in a few cases where folks are working closely with us, but I would expect that if you need a really stable platform we'd help you back port. To be honest, being aware of the changes, I don't see a major problem there. However we can't push the code back in to the 1.3 release tree due to the added dependencies.

I think you want to go into it with a pretty clear plan of what you are getting into. Basically you are putting yourself into a position where you may want to be fairly pro-active on understanding and paying attention to changes in Ontario (and Canadian federal) tax withholding and the like. This isn't the end of the world, I would expect, but it does mean that you may find yourself with more ongoing work that you would expect at first. I suspect this is more of an opportunity than a burden though.

Well, what I'm looking to start here has a limited scope, but I do understand what you are saying. I've looked at the rules and they aren't super simple, that's for sure.

The big point I would make is that you could easily set yourself up as the point of maintenance of payroll rules for this customer. If you are going to do it, you might as well try to set yourself up as the go-to person for Ontario payroll. We can talk more about what we can do to make this work perhaps over IRC or the like.

I'm willing to spend some time on this, but I have to say it's not my favorite itch to scratch (reading tax updates, I mean). I'm sure we'll have some future discussions on this; maybe we can get some kind of donation pool going to assist.

Right. Unfortunately that may be what you are getting yourself into. My business can help you out in some ways. Let's talk more off list.

The state of payroll in 1.4 currently is that we have a basic framework designed, but there are a few missing pieces. I would suggest that we start a discussion on the -devel list regarding payroll and getting going with it.

Okay. I started here after looking through the dev-list archives and not seeing much on the 1.4 stuff lately. I did find there was a bunch of good user focused docs, but is there any dev stuff? (Maybe a better question for the dev list, but I want to start coding a "Hello World" type part into LedgerSMB just to prove the basics are working).

Maybe I could help get you started over Skype?

Best Wishes,

Chris Travers

Thanks,
Gerald

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Best Wishes,

Chris Travers

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