ContractorKeith in one SlowBooks test company, posting time to a job and then running payroll moved net income by $361.19. only $31.19 of employer tax was new.
the other $330 was labor getting counted twice.
that is where the work went after the first Mac release. Trent Van Holten created SlowBooks Pro and leads the project. i maintain the Apple Silicon package, and the testing laps have also turned into fixes to the bookkeeping underneath it.
a job-costing bug i could reproduce
PR #87 records the problem and the correction. posting time charged the job, but its offset was a liability account. payroll then charged wages for the same approved hours.
the labor offset needed to be an expense contra, matching the other allocation offsets, so assigning labor to a job would preserve company net income until payroll posted the actual expense.
and a new regression test checked exactly that: posting time to the job leaves net income unchanged, while job profitability still reconciles to the P&L.
same hours. one expense.
the review also caught rejected time entries leaving their cost on the job, estimate reseeding overwriting manual budget rows, and missing unit costs silently becoming sale amounts in the cost budget. those corrections went into the same upstream PR.
as an estimator, a missing cost becoming zero margin without anyone saying so bothers me. the fix keeps the cost visibly unknown instead of borrowing the selling price.
the check that went negative
in PR #89, an oversized post-tax deduction on a $200 gross check produced negative $15.30 net pay. processing it then failed with an unbalanced journal entry.
the deduction calculation had not been given the actual amount remaining after taxes. the correction caps post-tax deductions to what is left, records when a deduction comes up short, and rejects an overdrawn garnishment stack instead of posting an unbalanced entry.
the reproduced check then processed with $184.70 in post-tax deductions and zero net pay. balanced.
but there was another failure in that lap. assigning a remittance vendor after payroll had run left an earlier deduction unbillable when its saved snapshot had no vendor. the fix uses the code’s current vendor only when the snapshot did not already have one.
these are descriptions of specific software tests and fixes, not payroll instructions. the PR includes the reproduction and regression coverage.
the package still has to open
the Mac work continued too. PR #101 corrected verification of the stapled application inside the DMG using its staged name. signing and notarization are only useful when the checks inspect the package people receive.
SlowBooks is now at v2.9.4. Trent’s broader releases include job costing, receipt intake, and nonprofit functionality. i am not claiming those releases as my own; the linked PRs show my part.
the project remains free and source-available under Trent’s license. the site has the downloads and product documentation.
my first contribution got SlowBooks onto a Mac. the useful work since then has often started with a test company, a number that looked wrong, and enough patience to follow it into the ledger.