PAYROLL SYSTEM

Payroll is one of a series of accounting transactions dealing with the process of paying employees for services rendered, after processing of the various requirements for withholding of money from the employee for payment of payroll taxes, insurance premiums, employee benefits, garnishments and other deductions.

Payroll involves the calculation of amounts due the employee, either as hourly wages, pay on a fixed basis such as a certain amount per week, pay to salespersons on commission, as well as reimbursement for employee-paid expenses such as travel expenses either as paid by the employee or based on a per diem rate.

In addition to these payments, there are often computed amounts of paid vacation time and accrued sick leave which have been used or are available for use. These are simply carried as bookkeeping entries as available or used and accumulate until the employee actually uses them. If an employee collects vacation pay or sick leave, these amounts are then added to the amount due the employee to be paid.

All of these monies credited to the employee are usually referred to as gross pay.

From these amounts that are credited to the employee, various debits are taken as withholding, the most significant being income tax, then other taxes such as social security and Medicare (in the United States; other countries have similar programs for the collection of government-mandated retirement benefit supplement systems). There may also be additional deductions for supplemental health insurance, union dues, pension plan contributions, garnishment for nonpayment of debts, repayment of prior salary, vacation or sick leave overpayments made in error, under collection of insurance, and other deductions.

The amount left after deductions from gross pay is generally the amount given in the employee's pay envelope, either as cash or a check. This amount is known as net pay. If the employee has their net pay deposited to their bank account (through a process known as direct deposit) then the employee may simply receive a pay stub indicating this.

In addition to amounts collected from the employee, frequently the employer is required to also pay additional monies of their own such as government taxes such as employer matching contribution to Social Security, and employer-paid systems such as unemployment insurance; employer matching for pension plans such as 401K; employer portion (or all) of employee health insurance, and additional expenses.

Organizations which have very few employees may perform payroll by hand. Business organizations which have become too large to perform such tasks by hand (or small ones that prefer not to do them by hand) will generally use accounting software on a computer to perform this task, or may pay a service bureau to perform the process of payroll calculation and writing of payroll checks.

Due to government mandated (and often severe) penalties for improper or inadequate collection of payroll taxes and paying of wages, almost all employers (other than very tiny ones having perhaps one or very few employees) either use a payroll computer program or a service bureau.

Other types of accounting transactions include accounts payable, accounts receivable, and trial balance.

Distributed computing is the process of running a single computational task on more than one distinct computer.

Introduction

This differs from cluster computing in that computers in a distributed computing environment are typically not exclusively running 'group' tasks, whereas clustered computers are usually much more tightly coupled. The difference makes distributed computing attractive because, when properly configured, it can use computational resources that would otherwise be unused. It can also make available computing resources which would otherwise be impossible. For example, the SETI@Home project uses 'idle time' on many thousands of computers throughout the world, and is able to analyze received signals that would have been impossible otherwise. Such arrangements permit handling of data that would otherwise require the power of expensive supercomputers.

Distributed computing is very attractive in part because interactive operation leaves most computers in 'idle' most of the time. The process which implements the distributed aspect (ie, that running on a machine normally devoted to other work) is usually specially designed to be a low priority process, using only computing power that would be 'wasted' anyway.

However, having a low-priority process constantly running prevents operating system power management routines from putting the processor into a low-power mode, resulting in increased electricity consumption. For some (typically recent, and high speed) CPUs, the difference can be on the order of tens of watts.

Distributed computing also often involves competition with other distributed systems. This competition may be for prestige, or it may be a means of enticing users to donate processing power to a specific project. For example, there is the so-called "stat race": a measure of what project has managed to perform the most distributed work over the past day or week. This has been found to be so important in practice that virtually all distributed computing projects offer on-line statistical analyses of their performances, updated at least daily, if not in real-time.