HSA Employer Contributions

f_stopblues

How should HSA employer contributions be recorded? My employer matches a portion of my contribution to a HSA account. I currently have my HSA contribution set up as a Paycheck as a Pre-Tax deduction.

NotACPA

My wife's employer only contributes the Match amount once a quarter.  So, I just show it as a deposit into her HSA using the _FlexContribSpouse built-in action.

I could have created my own category for this income ... but since we weren't otherwise using the Flex Contrib category, it works fine.

How often does your employer make the match contribs?  That could change my suggestion.

f_stopblues

It looks like it is just twice a year, so not very frequent

f_stopblues

What do you mean by Built-In action?

NotACPA

f_stopblues said:

What do you mean by Built-In action?

That's one of the categories that Q automatically creates.

f_stopblues

Would you create a separate transaction to record the HSA Employer Contribution? Or somehow include it in the regular salary paycheck entry? It doesn't seem like there's a good way to include it in the regular salary paycheck engry

Sherlock

f_stopblues said:

Would you create a separate transaction to record the HSA Employer Contribution? Or somehow include it in the regular salary paycheck entry? It doesn't seem like there's a good way to include it in the regular salary paycheck engry

If the HSA Employer Contribution is included with every paycheck, I would add an earnings entry with an appropriate income category and a transfer to the HSA account.  Otherwise, I would simply enter the contribution as a deposit in the HSA account as @NotACPA already suggested.

NotACPA

The employer contributions to her RETIREMENT account happen with every paycheck ... so they're recorded in the paycheck.

BUT, the employer contributions to her HSA only happen once a quarter (for the OP, it's twice a year) ... so a simple deposit directly to the HSA using any category that you choose is what @Sherlock and I are both suggesting.

bakeec

> @f_stopblues said:
> Would you create a separate transaction to record the HSA Employer Contribution? Or somehow include it in the regular salary paycheck entry? It doesn't seem like there's a good way to include it in the regular salary paycheck engry

I agree with the others.... But I'm slightly confused by how your employer matches HSA contributions. If they are truly matching HSA contributions, they should be depositing those funds directly into your HSA account. Otherwise, if you actually get those funds in your take-home pay, it's really more of a bonus that you can do whatever you want with.

For me, I have two recurring transactions in my HSA account every two weeks (which is how often I'm paid). The Payee on one is "Optum Bank HSA Individual Contribution" and the other is "Optum Bank HSA Employer Contribution". I record both with "Health Care" as the category because that's what those funds will be used for.

My paycheck is always one budget category ("Income: Paycheck"), but if you occasionally get "extra" money in your pay, I'd want to record the extra portion differently -- with either a different budget category or a tag.

nddebarmore

I'm not sure if this is the best way to do it, but it is how I do it.

I create an entry in my Earnings section with a Name of "HSA Employer Contribution" with a category of Other Inc:HSA Employer Contribution

Next, I create a matching Pre-Tax Deduction entry with the same name as above. However, the Category for this entry is my HSA account "[Anthem HSA]" in my case.

Doing it this way, I have not increased my W-2 income for my reports and because the transactions cancel themselves out, the Net Pay is the same.

In my case, our employer pays a lump sum in the first page check of $1500 and then another $500 prorated across 26 paychecks.