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).

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 5. Payroll Settings, 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.

Just below this section, expand the Leave Liability options by clicking 'Track Leave Accruals on your Journal'

Here you can configure the account you want to accrue leave liabilities for this leave type against.

After posting your next pay run, your leave liability accounts will be included in the payroll journal. This will include:

The cost of any leave accrued in this payroll period (calculated by multiplying the hours accrued by the employee's hourly rate, multiplied by any leave loading that applies to that leave type)
Any change to the liability accounts due to an employee's salary or hourly rate changing (calculated by multiply the employee's current leave balance by the change in their salary/hourly rate from the last pay period to the current pay period)

To see current liabilities for each leave type, use the Employee Current Leave Balance report.