How to calculate

[George52]

I am retired and I thought that this would make my mind work so I took up Filemaker. I want to calculate taxes, for example gross of 6500.00 first 29000.00 at x% the next 29000.00 to 45000.00 at y% and so on.

[comment]

Can you expand a little bit on what this is about? The calculation itself should not be too difficult, I think . The more important question, IMHO,  is where should the rates be stored. Since rates tend to change over time, you must decide whether you need to keep the rates as they were at the time of each calculation, or is it sufficient to keep only the result.

 

[George52]

I am trying to build a payroll app for my daughter and what to do the income tax section

[George52]

I should explain this a little better, I am working on an app for my daughter that will do payroll for her. I don't know how to work out the tax deduction (gross amount 6000) and there will be tax of a % on the first 2000 and then a %on 2000 to 5000 and so on. I have no idea how to do this. if you could even point me in the right direction would be great.

[comment]

7 hours ago, George52 said:

I should explain this a little better

Indeed you should. I don't think you've answered my concerns at all.

I could easily answer your question as asked: given a gross amount amt and a tax bracket of 7% from 2000 to 5000, the tax in the given bracket can be calculated as =

Max ( Min ( amt ; 5000 ) - 2000 ; 0 ) * .07

However, this requires hard-coding the tax bracket's limits and rate into the calculation - which, as I explained, is not a good idea.

My tendency would be to create a record  in a related table for each tax bracket applicable to the given gross amount. Naturally, this would have to be scripted - and the same script could also loop over the tax brackets and pass the remaining amount to the next iteration. The next best alternative, IMHO, would be to use repeating fields to calculate and store the amount and the tax in each bracket. The third option is to store only the calculated tax amount, without leaving any trail of how it was computed.

In any case, the process needs to start by retrieving the current tax brackets from another table. This is the only arrangement that will allow you to change them without affecting previously calculated taxes.

 

Edited March 12, 2021 by comment