HR & Payroll Guides

“Where did this figure come from?” On a payslip, a payroll journal or the wages line in your trial balance, the answer decides where you look, and payroll has a surprise in it: a run can read posted while the trial balance has not moved. This section is for whoever keeps the books of a group that pays its staff every month. At GadgetSphere that is one run a month for each of GS, GSO and GSD, across 22 branches. Payroll is computed in another system today, so the month comes into BigLedger in two jobs:

Posting the month's payroll journal

One journal per company, in the right month, a branch on every line

Handing salary-paid claims to payroll

Export, total, find the late approvals, keep the register

The rest of this page is about Payroll Admin: what it would do behind the screen, and where each payroll figure would come from.

Payroll Admin is not in the Applet Store. It has no row in the applet registry (checked again on 25 October 2026), so nothing installs it, and the walkthrough describes screens you cannot open yet. It is written from the applet’s source so that you can judge what the module will do when it ships. If you need to run payroll this month, it runs in whatever system runs it today and BigLedger receives the monthly result as a general journal: see Posting the month’s payroll journal.

Configure and run monthly payroll

Company setup through Calculate, bank file, Post GL and statutory TXT — about 90 minutes the first time

What a pay run writes, button by button

Each button on a pay run — Calculate, Approve, Finalize, Generate Bank File, Post GL, File statutory — is a separate write that reads its inputs at the moment you press it, and a recalculation deletes the payslips it replaces. The button-by-button table, with what each is allowed from, is on the Payroll Admin reference.

What Post GL writes, and what reaches your ledger

Post GL writes no general-ledger journal. It writes a PRJ- journal of three lines — payroll expense, net-pay liability, statutory liability — into the payroll module’s own tables, stamped POSTED, and the trial balance does not move. Wages reach your books only through a general journal that a person posts in Ledger And Journal, and the server refuses it unless debits equal credits — so it must also credit what Post GL leaves out, such as a deduction for a laptop an employee bought.

The worked example — a laptop bought by a GS-KV-01 adviser and recovered at RM 530 a month, credited to Employee Payable in the month’s journal — is in HR & Payroll related applets, A month of people administration at GadgetSphere; the exact lines are under What Post GL actually posts.

Read these for the rest of the job

You want to know…	Read
Whether a payroll figure was stored at Calculate or is read fresh — the first question when a number looks wrong	Payroll figures: stored once, or worked out again
What must exist before the first run (Payment Config, Employee Payable, chart codes, employer numbers, one Statutory Rates header per scheme)	Configure and run monthly payroll, Steps 1-8, and Related applets
How net pay leaves the bank, and the two ways to record it	Paying the salary batch: two shapes
Adding approved expense claims to pay	Handing salary-paid claims to payroll
What breaks when a run is redone or back-dated	What breaks elsewhere
Who approves, checks the statutory figures, posts the journal, and when not to post	The parts of the job that stay with a person
The journal you post this month	Posting the month’s payroll journal

Common mistakes

Symptom	Read
Only once Payroll Admin is available to you: a run reads `POSTED` and wages in the trial balance have not moved	Post GL writes only to payroll’s own tables — post the general journal (above)
Wages in the trial balance are nil, double or different from the payroll	Wages in the trial balance do not match the payroll
An approved salary-paid claim was not on the payslip	An approved salary-paid claim never reached the payslip
Contributions look plausible, and the trace says `fallback`; or a rate change made no difference	Troubleshooting payroll — no header, or a second header for the same scheme
The payroll journal’s debits exceed its credits by a staff loan or a deduction	What Post GL actually posts
A sale or advance to an employee is finalised with no journal	Employee Payable unmapped — Related applets
The salary debit on the bank statement has nothing to match	Paying the salary batch: two shapes
A statutory file is full of zeros where the employer number should be	Step 12 — Company Setup had no employer number

What success looks like

After the month’s journal is posted, in each company’s trial balance: wages expense equals gross pay plus the employer’s contributions; the net-pay payable is nil after pay day (if you pay through a voucher); and each statutory liability is nil after the 15th of the following month.