Exporting payroll journals to accounts software

Setting up your mapping within Thesaurus Payroll Manager

Mapping tells the payroll where things get posted to in the accounts software.

For example, you may have a nominal ledger account in your accounts program called “Wages and Salaries” and this is where you may want to post the wages and salaries costs from the payroll. If there are directors, you may want to see their costs separated out into another account, possibly called “Directors Pay”.

The taxes deducted will usually be posted to a liability account, possibly called “Payroll Taxes”.

The actual employee payments will be posted either directly to the relevant bank account or to a liability control account, sometimes called the “Salary Control Account” or “Wages Control”. The advantage of the former is that cheques/debits may not need to be separately posted within your accounts software as they will already have been posted in the payroll journal. The advantage of the latter is that it provides a useful way of reconciling both sets of entries. In the case of the latter, cheques/debits would also be posted to this control account within your accounts software.

Other payroll items may also require mapping e.g. employer pension costs, pension liabilities outstanding etc.

In some accounts packages, a numerical code is needed to accurately identify the nominal account

e.g. 7000 – Employee Costs (Sage), 477 – Wages and Salaries (Xero)

In such cases, you should enter the numerical code within Thesaurus Payroll Manager. Optionally you can follow the code with a hyphen and a description

e.g. 477

or

477 – Wages and Salaries

Entering the description is preferable as the journal printout, from within the payroll software, will make more sense with descriptions.

Thesaurus Payroll Manager will ask you 5 questions and this may be all of the information required to generate accurate payroll journals.

If the answer to 2 of these questions (directors and pensions) are affirmative, then some more input may be required. Ask your accountant if you are not sure of anything.

You can also provide the software with some optional nominal account details you might want to use for the detailed mapping e.g. you may want to map one of your “Non-tax allowable deductions” to “Staff Loans”.

The second screen allows you to specify the detailed mapping, although in the majority of cases you can accept the mapping as proposed by Thesaurus Payroll Manager, which it will have populated from the answers you supplied on the first screen.

In relation to departments or cost centres, there is no mapping of these and if you want to benefit from departmental details being included in the accounts journals, it will be necessary that the departments/cost centres have the same name in both software packages.