What is a payroll journal?
A payroll journal is a financial record used by businesses to keep track of all payroll-related transactions. This includes details about employee wages, bonuses, tax withheld and superannuation accruals.
A Payroll journal is made available for every posted pay run. The journal can then be transferred into your account platform and posted to the general ledger.
Configuring your chart of accounts in Tanda
By default, your Tanda account is pre-configured with generic accounts. You can edit the name and code of these to match what you already have set in your account platform.
If your journal requirements are more comprehensive (i.e. you have a different wage expense account per team), create these as new accounts by navigating to Payroll > Payroll Settings > Journal Setup (Accounts).
Add a new account by clicking 'New +' and complete the following fields
Enter the name of the account
Enter the code for the account (this should match the account code you have setup in your account platform)
(Optional) Select the corresponding super expense account (Only applicable if you are creating a Wage Expense account)
Configure default accounts
Your default accounts can be configured via Payroll > Payroll Settings > Company Setup.
These accounts will be used if no team-specific wage expense accounts are assigned.
Configuring team-specific wage and leave expense accounts
To report wages from different teams or locations to separate payroll accounts, you can set up team-specific accounts.
Navigate to Workforce > Teams and click edit on the relevant team.
Under the 'Tanda Payroll Journal Account' heading, select the relevant wage expense account.
To set a specific account for leave types, select the relevant leave type, and the payroll accounts that should be used when an employee's leave is costed to this team.
When an employee works in that team, their earnings/ leave lines will be allocated to that wage expense account. The corresponding super lines will be allocated to the linked super expense account (if one was set).
This setup is important for non-salaried employees as they will have information exported from the timesheets. For Salaried employees, the journal account should be allocated to their Autopaid earnings template as this is what is added to the payslip.
Configuring leave liabilities to show on your journal
Leave liabilities track the dollar amount of certain leave types that must be paid out to an employee on termination. Common examples include:
Annual Leave
Time in Lieu
Long Service Leave (in some scenarios)
The following steps cover setting up your leave liability accounts.
Ensure you've created your liability accounts in your chart of accounts, covered here.
Navigate to Payroll > Payroll Settings > Leave Types and select the relevant leave type.
Under 1. Base Leave Details, select your leave expense account. If you have configured any team-specific leave detailed earlier in the guide, they will appear in a list. The team-specific leave expense account will be used first for these teams.
This is also where your Liability Account will be set up for this leave type:
After posting your next pay run, your leave liability accounts will be included in the payroll journal. This is calculated by:
The hours accrued * employee's hourly rate * leave loading (set up in section 4. Leave Rules of that leave type)
Tanda will also calculate any changes to an employee's salary or hourly rate. This is calculated by:
The employee's current leave balance * the change in their salary/hourly rate (equal to the rate in the last pay period - the rate in the current pay period)
This will also have an explanation in the Narration column
To see current liabilities for each leave type, use the Employee Current Leave Balance report.
Download your journal to csv
The option to download in a specific csv format will show below your journal:
If the formatting for your accounting software isn't shown, these can be formatted in the csv file.