If a playable Sim works for an owned business, when I play the household of the employee, is the money he gets as his salary taken from the employer's household or the money simply falls from the sky?

I'm pretty sure it just falls from the sky, because it works just like a proper job when you're playing the household of the employee, though I haven't checked to make sure.

The money gets taken from the owner when you play the owner.

If you play as the owner, that amount is deducted from the owner's money coffers (but does the employee get the money?). If you play as the employee, you get paid, but no money is actually taken from the owner.

It should theoretically only work when playing the owner of the business. Since there are no mandatory set hours for a player run business there's no protocol for a wage which can be calculated by the game so that an employee is paid when not at the business. The only way to make it acceptably realistic for a two way approach would be multiple custom jobs reflecting the hours and wages of each owned business so that when playing employee households it will still look like they go to work.

They do go to work, SingleClaw. They're absent from their house for a default number of hours - 8 to 5 for adults, 3 to 5 for teens - and are paid the hourly rate set for them. They also get paid when you take a third-party sim to the business, when neither is being played. For every hour the visitor stays on the lot, the employee receives his hourly rate, which is subtracted from the income of the employer just as it is when the employer is being played.

The question is, whether the money the employee makes by going into his job when his household is paid is deducted from the employer's income as it is when the employer calls the employee in and when both employer and employee are summoned by someone using the lot.

We're having contradictory information here, yet it should be easy enough to test by someone who, you know, remembers to make note of monetary amounts and can do math. Unlike, say, me.

In my defense I did say theoretically lol. I based that on the knowledge that when you move in for example Crystal Vu in strangetown she keeps her job when moving in, but when I made the female Landgraab employee playable she never tried to go to work as you described which to me reinforced my idea that because it wasn't a proper maxis job that it couldn't be done as such. So now I'm wondering if it was a glitch or are townie employees who work in a player own shop a special class all of their own should they become playable?

I would be happy if it was a glitch because then I could revisit my axed storyline about capitalistic greed and the effects on it's employees in their daily decision making (what are you looking at me like that for it was either a psychology story line or a demonically posessed infant who first act was to slap the mother upon birth and I chose the more interesting one)

If you made Landgraab's employee playable by moving her into his house, she would have lost the job because (without a hack) you can't have an employee from your own house. They work for free! If you did it any other way then I have no experience of what happens. You could just rehire her, though.