Categories
Business

ZaFin Genesis

ZaFin is the finally born with the first feature arrived: PAYE. (Hey. It’s a start and a natural one at that given it’s history). Now, ZaFin is a long-term project and has been a goal to get going for a long time now. Essentially, it’s the place to post tools which help you reach numbers you need to make informed decisions for yourselves. Given the state of the world economics at the moment, give me one good reason why would I want to get financial advice from “the system”? It’s track record speaks for itself. Neh. Have the courage to think for yourself, right?

So ZaFin is supposed to be that kind of place. A spot where you can, armed with a bunch of quick little nifty calculators, reach and juggle numbers to come up with a reasonable conclusion. You don’t need an advisor for that. I believe, armed with the right information (ie. numbers) most reasonable folk can come make up their own minds. And make pretty good decisions on their own too (and maybe also check in with an honest friend to bounce some ideas off).

There will be more to come, slowly, over time, as time allows; baby steps. Hope you find the first tool useful, and more importantly, simple to use and to the point giving all you need, and only what you need.

Categories
Business Rants Technology

PAYE

UPDATE: 3 July 2008
Updated code to reflect more recent tax tables (2009)

When I was asked to estimate PAYE on a gross monthly salary, i hauled out the calculator and started chipping away, according to the SARS Tax Tables. Not being a tax consultant or looking at various structured packages, the first stab is mostly always a straightforward estimate without investigating further deductions. While doing this, the math-programmer inside me went… “Mmmm. Calculator. Boring. Ruby. Smile”

Turns out, it’s a simple little script; a useful little snippet and, bonus, i migrated some more learning onto Ruby. An aside; there’s definitely something about the difference in speed and endurance of learning between my brain versus my hands. You know the feeling. You can forget a password mentally, but let your fingers do the talking… And utilising muscle memory as an aid is just one of the many senses you can draw on…

Back to the snippet. Not too much interesting going on in terms of code. I chose a multidimensional array for storing the tax table. First used a hash, found it was overkill, reverted. Also did a classic switch in the beginning, to determine which “bracket” your pay falls into, but then figured a straightforward loop works just as well. This was an interesting break in habits from C# however.

In C#, looping through an array would be: for(int ii=0;ii<array.length-1;ii++)
I did the same in Ruby, transliterated the code, first time round: for ii in 0..array.length-1
But then, the knowledge of the “times” method changed my thinking completely: 6.times { |ii| … }
There are, afterall, one of 6 tax brackets you are likely to fall in (for all positive salaries)

And that’s where it hit me: the uncomfortable (more about that later) shift away from a corporate-sponsored, statically typed, IDE-integrated, certificate-oriented, compilable(?) programming language into a community-driven, dynamic scripting language is underpinned by these sudden ferocious rushes of freedom. Too much freedom? Certainly, too much to what i’m accustomed to sometimes.

Why’s that uncomfortable? Well, MSDN, VS, MS communities and the framework tell you how to code- to a large extent. They dictate the patterns, the constructs, the idioms; in short, they impose a very definite way of doing things. And it’s a big abstraction layer, forever changing (but not really) and giving you tons of resources to make your coding easier. This is good. Books, online help, built-in help, IDEs, intellisense… and more of all the good stuff. Don’t get me wrong, these things made me very productive and i’m grateful for that. But then you break away from that.

You gotta search for help (no nicely packaged MSDN DVD delivered to your door). You gotta scratch under the hood. You have to engage with community blogs and real people in a virtual world. You are forced to read opinions. You are stripped to the only the most simple of tools- a plain text editor. On a coding level, you are forced to remember namespaces, method names, variable names, libraries… no more intellisense to rely on. And this is where it was difficult. No more crutches to help me be more productive. I had to start thinking- for real now- and remembering stuff. And then i got scared: what if the “community” changed something and i didn’t know about it- or worse, didn’t agree with it? And I didn’t get an email with an updated change delivered to me automatically via updates or DVD? Hang on! Is that really the way it’s supposed to be? Have i become that lazy? Oops.

And all i was doing was having some fun, writing a little script to calculate PAYE so that next time someone asks me, i save myself a little more time.

Btw, the Source Code is here, if you’re interested.